May 1, 2015 Lunch - Asian Pear, dinner New Recipe - Red Cooked Chicken with steamed Rice and Taka Choy.

May 1, 2015  Lunch - Asian Pear,   dinner  New Recipe - Red Cooked Chicken with steamed Rice and Taka Choy.

Today Bill Turner and I went to lunch again at the Asian Pear, the new Korean Restaurant downtown.  I ordered the BBQ Chicken Plate ($6.99), which means Chicken Teriyaki with stir fried glass noodles in soy sauce, plus a small plate with a couple of slices of Korean vegetable pancake and a small bowl of Kimchee. 

Here is a picture:

Yesterday I bought four leg quarters of chicken at Ranch Market for $.49/lb. that I wanted to cook for dinner today.  I decided to make one of my old Chinese chicken favorites, which is a new recipe to this blog, Red cooked chicken.  Forty years ago my mother gave me The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook, which I utilized for many years that I lived alone and cooked most of my meals with my wok.  I would make a pot of rice for the week and buy vegetables and meats and portion the meat into packets for one day’s use.  I always kept garlic and ginger and the sauces at the ready.  

I would stir fry a meat with some of the vegetables and garlic and ginger and sauces each day and eat with the rice.  This was a healthy and simple way to vary my diet.

Red Cooked Chicken is one of the easiest recipes to use to prepare chicken in a wok.  I started cooking it at 5:15 and we ate at 6:30.

Here is the recipe:

 You simply bring the ingredients to a boil in the wok and add the chicken cut into pieces and cook at a strong simmer covered for 40 to 45 minutes turning occasionally so all the meat is covered with the liquid.  I add both the scallions and the ginger and garlic and use both honey and brown sugar. 

The result is chicken, cooked in a dark sweet soy rich sauce with scallions and ginger.  One of the things I most like about this recipe is that the gelatinous material in the chicken is released as it simmers in the sauce in the wok, which thickens the sauce.  I usually remove most of the skin and the fat from the chicken, so fat will not interfere with the flavor of the sauce or the operation of my arteries.

Like my favorite Chinese meals, the sauce in which the chicken is cooked becomes enriched with chicken flavor and the resulting sauce becomes the sauce to flavor the rice.  You simply put a pile of rice in a bowl and ladle the chicken and some of the sauce over the rice and eat the sauce flavored rice along with the chicken.

Tonight I added a green vegetable by chopping four or five stalks of Taka choy I bought at Ta Lin last week into 1 to 2 inch long pieces and laid them on top of the rice for the last eight minutes of steaming time to wilt them and served the combined greens and rice with the chicken.

This method of cooking chicken is super simple to prepare and totally delicious.

After dinner we went to the small house exhibit at Summer and Dine, where Suzette bought two small houses in Off Center’s sponsored silent auction.  I had worked on a Response to a Motion in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals last night, which resulted in my getting only four or five hours sleep, I faded fast and we had to go home to bed around 8:30.

Bon Appétit