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On tonight's menu: Hainanese Chicken Rice.

This should be relatively easy, but I've seen many variations of cooking this dish. To make sure I don't overcook the chicken or miss out on key ingredients, I've plucked a recipe out of a book entitled Asian Favourites to see what's required. After having a look at it, I've decided to substitute one or two of the ingredients.

The recipe is for four, but I'm cooking for two, so need to do some modification of proportions. Instead of using an entire chicken, I'm using four chicken thighs (including the drumstick bit). I plan to serve half the chicken, reserving the rest for another recipe. Rather than peanut oil, I prefer a healthier vegetable oil. The recipe also calls for a large onion, sliced, cooked with the rice. Half an onion is still too much. I don't recall chicken rice having any onions in it. Perhaps I shall just leave that out.

Two hours (this requires quite a bit of work!) and two gingery sets of fingers later, I have reached the following conclusions:-

(1) Getting the chicken cooked is the only easy part.
(2) After frying uncooked rice in garlic and fat, the rice somehow expands in volume. The sticky bit happens when you pop it into the rice cooker and attempt to add stock to the etching that corresponds to the correct number of cups. The level of rice itself has risen above the corresponding mark! And the mixture plus stock is too hot to do the measurement the traditional way (i.e. by putting your hand into the pot and adding stock until the liquid level just comes up to your knuckle).
(3) Trying to make the chilli sauce gets challenging when you realise you didn't buy the ingredients.
(4) Hong Kong imports fatty chicken. The resulting stock is covered by a thick layer of oil. Took me a few minutes to remove most of it (though some remains!).
(5) A cleaver would be most a useful thing to have, in hindsight.