Soy Sauce Chicken with Liquorice Roots

This is a modified recipe from the original recipe that I posted last month on Soy Sauce Chicken. I wanted a chicken dish with vegetables that doesn't require long time of preparation and cooking. I also wanted to have a grilled chicken meat without using the toaster or oven. If you are residing in Singapore, Happy Call Pan is a no stranger term of cookware to you. I was cooking this dish with this magical pan.

I threw in lots of carrot to this dish which added the natural sweetness to it. It is tasty and best to have it together with a bowl of white rice. The flavour and taste is completely different from the Soy Sauce Chicken I posted a while ago.

Soy Sauce Chicken with Liquorice Roots

Ingredients
3 drumsticks with thighs
salt to wash chicken

10 shallots, skin peeled
10 cloves of garlic, skin peeled
1 cup of water
4 - 6 medium-sized carrots, cut into thick slices
2 pieces of 3 inches long Liquorice Roots
1 piece 0.5 cm thick ginger
6 cubes small rock sugar

To Marinate the Meat:
2 tablespoon of mushroom sauce
2 tablespoon of light soy sauce
1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce
generous amount of salt
1 tablespoon of oil

Method

1. Wash chicken with salt and remove all fat.

2. Marinate the chicken with the seasonings and set aside at least for 15 minutes

3. Heat one tablespoon of oil in a Happy Call Pan using medium fire. Fry shallots, garlics and ginger until light brown and fragrant.

4. Push onions etc to the side of the pan and place chicken flat touching the pan. Keep the balance of the sauce for later use. Fry it for about 1 minutes both side or until colour changed and the chicken slightly grilled on both surfaces.

5.  Add in balance of the seasoning sauce, water, liquorice roots, carrots. Let it come to a boil then close the pan and lock it for 15 minutes.

6. Open the pan, stir the ingredients and flip the chicken. Close and lock for another 15 minutes. If it is too dry add a bit of water.

7. Throw in the rock sugar, close and lock the pan for another 5 minutes. Stir well, let it rest for at least 10 minutes and serve hot.

Notes :

1. If you are cooking this as a confinement food, do add generous amount of small onions, ginger slices and liquorice roots into the dish.

Soy Sauce Chicken

I could still remember the taste of the succulent soy sauce chicken that my confinement lady cooked for me. The ingredients used are so simple and the method is easy. The trick to make a yummy and fragrant soy sauce chicken is to use a very good quality light soy sauce. I grew up in a Chinese village in Kuala Lumpur. Our family never used any store-bought light and dark soy sauces right up to now. We are so blessed that we are able to get the supplies for both sauces fresh from a self-brewed vendor who will come to our place to sell the sauces in a small lorry. So far I could not get a brand of soy sauce that is closed to that standard. Recently I am pleased that I found this brand of light soy sauce that produced by Kwong Cheong Thye which is light, fragrant and not salty.

If you want to serve this food as confinement dish, do double the amount of small onions and add some ginger slices in but still the one that I had for confinement was without ginger. I served this with Koka fat free noodle which has no preservative. Though it was healthy but I didn't quite like the texture of the noodle.

Ingredients

3 drumsticks

Salt to wash chicken
 

1/2 cup soy sauce

1.5 cup water

10 shallots, skin peeled

1 cinnamon stick

1 star of anise

1 tbsp oyster sauce

1 tbsp black sauce

Dash of sesame oil
2 medium sized rock sugar
1 - 2 tablespoons of oil

Method

1. Wash and rub chicken thighs with salt. Remove fat under skin, pat dry and set aside.

2. Wash cinnamon stick and star of anise and set aside.

3. Put 1 tablespoon of oil and add cinnamon stick and star of anise when the oil is heated up.

4. Add in the shallots and stir fry for a minute. Then add in the rest of the ingredients except balance of oil.

5. Cook in slow fire for about half an hour. Switch off fire let the chicken rest in the sauce for at least 15 minutes before serving the dish.

Notes
1. You can use a thermal pot to cook this dish. Simply transfer the chicken with the rest of the ingredients in step 5 to a thermal pot and let it cook in the pot itself for one hour. For this method do reduce the amount of water to 1 cup.

2. You may replace the cinnamon stick and star of anise with a few sticks of liquorice root and a handful of tiny red rose buds for another new recipe. I tried this before and it tasted yummy and fragrant with mild rose aroma.

3. If you want a stronger herbal flavour and twist this further for a real confinement food, you may omit the shallots, cinnamon sticks, star of anise and all the sauces but add in Dong Kwai (Angelica sinensis), red dates, Goji (wolfberries) and condiment like chicken essence or Huiji Waist Tonic.

4. This dish goes well with rice or noodle and it is all up to you!

Chinese Confinement Food

Hello... wishing all my Chinese readers 'Kong Hee Fat Choy' & Happy Chinese New Year. Today is the 8th day of the first month of the Chinese Lunar calendar and the whole celebration is going to end soon on the 15th day. Kind of miss my family back home in Kuala Lumpur because normally on this day, we will gather at nite for preparation of some ritual worship. Though I am not the believer, i like the mood of preparation and the small gathering we had to catch up.

This Chinese New Year I am not baking any pastries as I have just given birth to a boy, the second addition to the family. I am coping to be a 'new mother' again to a new precious life :) That also explained the long silence of my blog that I have not been updating for months!! For those who follows my blogs, I am sorry. Nevertheless, I really wish to share with you some of the confinement foods that I was 'served' during the first month.

During the first week of the confinement, i took nothing but mainly black fungus, ginger, pork, chicken and some Chinese herbs; brewed into soup mainly to expel clog blood and wind. During this period it is pointless to take too much tonic drinks as the body is too weak and 'windy' to absorb the nutrients. Vegetables such as broccoli, carrots, capsicums, snow peas were slowly introduced to the diet during second week. We believe that fish consumption should not be too early during confinement as this will cause a person to dislike fish when they grow older. My mum said that my grandmother was a good example of not heeding the advice that she hated fish when she grew old! Could this be just an old wife tales? I don't know but I insisted to consume some to boost up my breast milk supply. By third week onwards, the diet will include more nutritional foods with a good balance of tonic soups. I took quite a lot of different tonic soups like cordycep double boiled with chicken, ginseng black chicken soup, chicken double boiled with wine and 'tong kwai' etc. These were taken every night for supper. On top of these, I have been taking soups for both lunches and dinners for one full month! We also used different types of wine in the cookings such as ginger wine, red rice wine, yellow rice wine, black dates wine and blue dates wine.

I have been consuming plentiful of ginger ... about 13 kilo in just one month that I really could not believe it that I took that much! I have posted some photos of the confinement food that I have had. I love to eat them all and the best of the best is my favourite black vinegar pig trotters! Yum yum! Enjoy....

Threadfine cooked in a few types of rice wines, ginger and dates
Soy sauce chicken with onions
Dried Longan, Red dates and some herbal chicken soup for lunch
'Mui Choy' (A Type of Sweet Chinese Vegetables) stewed with pork
Simple ABC soup
Pork Liver with plenty of ginger
Forever Green Snowpeas with ginger and carrot
'Ka Char Ma'/'Yi Mu Choa' (A type of Chinese dried herbs) cooked with chicken and wine
Strictly red residue rice wine with chicken
Fried Chicken marinated with ginger and soy sauce
Pig Trotter with black Vinegar
Pig Stomach Organ Soup with lot of pepper
Chicken Chinese Herbal soup
Steamed Chicken with Black Fungus and Ginger
Steam Fish with Ginger, Red Dates and Black Fungus
Pig Liver Soup with Black Fungus and Pork
Ginger Fried Noodle
Chicken Lemongrass Soup
Fried Spinach with Ginger
Fried Threadfin with plentiful of Shredded Ginger on top...yum!


This is not a confinement food but the morning breakfast that my husband prepared for me before I went to give birth :)