I made Hainanese chicken rice yesterday for the first time and it turned out very well! Blai didn't have a mortar and pestle (and I didn't expect him to) so making the ginger/spring onion sauce and the chilli sauce was quite difficult (squishing with a fork!). But they turned out better than I expected. The rice could have been flavoured more and so I'll add a bit of chopped up ginger next time I make it. The picture to the left isn't my chicken rice but it looks similar.

For those of you who don't know what chicken rice is, it's a poached chicken and rice dish. The chicken is quite plain and is only flavoured with whatever aromatics are placed into the boiling water/stock it's poached in. The chicken is also served at room temperature. The rice is very flavourful as it's made with garlic, shallots and the stock where the chicken was cooking. Yum! There are also a variety of sauces that go with it all. The stock is also served as a soup - I added carrots and onions to beef it up a little, like how a restaurant back home makes it.

I didn't follow one recipe explicitly but I used ideas from these three recipes: GourmetHunt, Gourmet magazine, Margaret Chan's recipe. Another sauce that is commonly used is a ginger/garlic sauce - I suggest pounding together ginger and garlic and salt. It's all a matter of taste so if you don't like garlic as much, use less and the same with the ginger. Actually, it follows for all the recipes here. I didn't make the chicken oil - there was enough oil floating around in the stock!

This morning, I took the leftover chicken and fried it up with dark sweet soy sauce and lots of shallots and some garlic and had that for lunch. I highly recommend it!