元宵节 :: 上元节 :: 煲仔鸡饭

The fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year is also known as '上元节' in China. No way we were going out to squeeze with the now-everyone's-back-in-town-squeeze-squeeze-crowd to check out lanterns at the parks and bazaars. Want to see more fireworks? Just stand at the window. A continuous boom of lights in a 360-degree panorama shooting up to about 30 storeys. Not fond of 'tangyuan' (汤圆) either, so we didn't want to eat out. Bff decided to do a shortened version of claypot chicken rice (煲仔鸡饭) for dinner.

In this version, she cheated lots. We didn't really care for crunchy or dried rice grains, so she didn't fry the rice and simply let it cook in the cooker. She also used her stash of liver sausages from Hong Kong, as well as the normal Chinese sausages to oil the rice and give it that unique flavor. Her partner has been well trained. He knows exactly what to use in the marinade and what else goes in. He was left alone to prepare that.

Since I liked playing with the rice so much, the bff relented and allowed me to wash the grains and put them into the cooker. Hahaha. I didn't know what went on in the kitchen after that. The bff and her partner did everything, and threw all the necessary ingredients into the cooker. They said it was easy since after that, it was just a matter of waiting for the cooker to be done with its job.

I simply loved the rice and the baby bok choi. Those worked fine for me. The marinade of dark soy and light soy in the rice was so tasty. In spite of not frying the grains and not using a claypot, the sauce was superior to the one we tried at Hengshan Cafe and Chinese Cuisine. In the marinade, there was also the special Chinese wine that was supposedly to be paired with hairy crabs, but the bff doesn't eat hairy crabs, so she uses it for all sorts of random purposes.

There was a truckload of mushrooms in there because the bff's partner and I are crazy over these dried shitake mushrooms.  I asked the bff not to use chopped up chicken pieces in the rice. So she improvised and used chicken wings that were bigger and could be removed easily. Between the bff and her partner, they finished all the chicken wings. Amazing. So nice meh, chicken wings?! She still had half of the concoction left to be frozen and thawed out for her lunch box this week.

Yes, this is another one of the bff's Hello Kitty bowls.