“Hey guys.”
“Nick?” . . . ”BLAARRRGGGHHH”
“Guys . . . you see me like every week. Relax.”
It’s good to be back in Eating World. I didn’t know but there was a national Singaporean holiday earlier this month so the chicken I was planning to eat only cost $8, that’s a saving of $3.30! Holiday indeed! Thank you Singapore for helping me budget in treats.
The chicken I was after is some of the most chickeny chicken you can get without compressing several chickens into one using some kind of ultra-powered gravitational centrifugal science thing. That would probably be awfully cruel though and I’m already feeling guilty about the increase in my meat intake. Curse blogs!
So the next best option is Hainanese Chicken: Get some chickens. Eat em. Cook the bits you couldn’t eat in a big pot with some yum stuff. Cook it again. And again until it get’s really chickeny. Get another chicken, preferably one brimming with lard, and broil it in the chickeny pot. When the chicken is tender and cooked put it on some ice. Get some rice and cook it in the chickeny pot.
You will now have really chickeny chicken with chickeny rice. Is it just me or does chickeny chicken sound like a nefarious crook who loves to click?
The last part with the ice makes the chicken skin go a jelly-like texture, which looks terrible, but tastes fatty and succulent. The chicken itself is perfectly tender and tasty. I always expect it to be more chickeny but I guess chicken on it’s own isn’t that chickeny, which is weird. Same thing goes with the rice.
The chicken and rice is served with kecap manis and a light chili paste with a wealthy heap of fresh ginger. There are two sides, oyster sauce with choy sum and a peppery soup. Although I enjoyed the chicken itself I was a bit disappointed with the meal. The choy sum was wet and soft like soggy side of a nacho and the soup was, well, peppery soup. I would have liked a bowl of chicken stock instead to complete the trifecta.
We got another popular Singaporean national dish, the char kway teow. Traditionally this is just flat rice noodles, prawns, shrimp paste, chinese sausage and rice cakes fried in pork fat and dark soy. It was traditionally served to labourers so the high saturated fat content was a justified and cheap way to get energy. The char kway teow at Shiok! seemed more like a whack of whatever left overs were still edible and servable with little risk of lawsuit. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as indulgent as I’m used to.
It’s supposed to be cooked in pork fat dammit – I want it to taste like it’s worth hours of my muscle-liquefying labour. Make me feel like a grizzled train-track worker not a kid looking for a cheap carb-loaded sugar high.
