I Make a Decent Pot of Brown Rice--and Other Miracles

I like Thursdays. They're better than my Fridays for various reasons. For one, Thursdays are often my best days to experiment in the kitchen thanks to our food schedule here at Chez Boeckman-Walker. Today has been no exception.

About That Pot of Brown Rice
Often by the time Thursday rolls around, I've already identified what I'm going to attempt to make. This week, I knew on Tuesday that I wanted to try out the sriracha-glazed chicken and onions recipe I'd found thanks to MyRecipe.com's weekly chicken recipes a-go-go email. The recipe calls for a bag of boil-in-bag long-grain rice, of which my pantry is bereft. Boil-in-the-bag brown rice? Check. Ten-pound bag (minus a few pounds) of basmati? Check. Five-pound bag of jasmine rice? Check. One-pound bag of long-grain (I think) brown rice? Check.

Ahh, dilemmas....

Since I've decided that I prefer brown rice with sriracha-anything, I knew coming in to Thursday that we'd be enjoying brown rice. But which one to use? On one hand, I felt that since I had a lot of time on my hands, why not make it from scratch? On the other hand, I have a piss-poor track record when it comes to making brown rice from scratch.

I know, I know, Gentle Reader, it's not that damn hard to boil some water with rice in it, cover it, simmer and wind up with an edible pot of rice. But for me it's damn hard. When I've tried it, my rice usually turns out chewy with lots of fairly solid grains mixed in or hard and dry. I've tried it in a pressure cooker, in a nonstick pot, in a regular pot and in a skillet--all to disastrous results.

But not tonight! For this time, Gentle Reader, I followed the directions on the package. Revolutionary thinking, t'ain't it? Yet it's true: I decided to humble myself by following the manufacturer's preparation suggestions and set aside my own understanding of how to make rice based on my own experiences--most of them successful--making jasmine, basmati, short-grain and regular 'ol white rice.

Which means that I put in two cups of water to the cup of rice I needed. No more shorting the water content as I do when making jasmine and basmati, for if I were to do the 2:1 ratio of water to rice with those other rices, I'd wind up with mush. And I also made sure the cooking brown rice was truly at a simmer, which is damn tough when you're not supposed to lift the lid during the 40 to 50 minutes the stuff's cooking.

After 50 minutes or so, I lifted the lid-and-towel combo I'd used to cover my pot of rice (the towel, in case you're wondering, Gentle Reader, absorbs the condensation from the lid, preventing it from dripping back down into the rice and making it mushy) and--miracle of miracles!--I had a pot of rice that looked just like the stuff that I produce in 8 minutes or so of preparing my favorite boil-in-the-bag brown rice. I was beyond ecstatic.

Topping the Rice
And by topping I mean that which went atop the rice, not some achievement that surpassed my success with the rice.

Let me start this section with an apology to you, Gentle Reader. I'm sorry that I've failed to well-document my love of Thai sweet chili sauce, sometimes called Mae Ploy because that's probably the most ubiquitous brand of the stuff. It's not to be confused with Thai chili sauce, or sriracha--although I do it constantly. And, mea culpa, I did it with this recipe too.

Don't get me wrong, Gentle Reader. I like hot and spicy stuff. However, I don't like sriracha that much because, well, it looks practically identical to my beloved Thai sweet chili sauce. Therefore, when I put sriracha on stuff at, say, Pei Wei, my taste buds expect that enticing combination of sweet and heat--and are totally screwed by sriracha's lack of sweet. I don't like to disappoint my taste buds. I value them greatly.

Sriracha-glazed Chicken and Onions Over Rice1 3.5-oz. bag boil-in-bag long-grain rice
3 T hoisin sauce
1 T ketchup
1 1/4 t Sriracha
1 1/2 T canola oil
1 1/2 C presliced onion
1 T bottled minced fresh ginger
1 T bottled minced garlic
3/4 t curry powder
1 lb. skinless, boneless chicken breast, cut into 1" thick slices

1. Prepare the rice according to the package directions, omitting the salt and fat.
   
2. While the rice cooks, combine the hoisin, ketchup and sriracha in a small bowl.
   
3. Heat the oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.
   
4. Add the onion and sauté 3 min. or until tender.
   
5. Add the ginger, garlic, curry powder and chicken, then sauté 6 min. or until the chicken is done.
   
6. Stir in the hoisin mixture and cook 1 min., tossing to coat.
   
7. Serve over rice.

Yield: 4 servings (serving size: 3/4 C chicken mixture and about 1/2 C rice)

Nutritional Info
Calories: 326
Fat: 7.3 g
Sat fat: 0.9 g
Protein: 29.5 g
Carbs: 34 g
Fiber: 2.2 g
Cholesterol: 66 mg
Sodium: 338 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
You can surely tell by browsing through the recipe, Gentle Reader, that this recipe is geared for those harried, stressed cooks with little time on their hands but a need to make a meal relatively from scratch. Presliced onions? Such things exist? Fuckaroo, people, how lazy and/or harried are you?

• I minced my own ginger, but I'll admit to using some of my bottled minced garlic because I'm out of garlic cloves.
  
• I used maybe half of the canola oil called for, if even that much. I didn't feel I needed that much.
  
• Instead of tossing the garlic, ginger, curry powder and chicken in all at once, I first put in the curry and stirred it around until it became fragrant because, dammit, I love the smell of warm curry powder. Then I put in the ginger, stirred a little bit while I struggled to get the tablespoon of ginger together. I would have put the garlic in before the ginger, which is something I learned from Indian cookbooks, but I'd stowed my minced ginger in the tablespoon I needed for the garlic, thus it had to go in first. Anywho, once the ginger and garlic became fragrant, then I started adding the chicken. Gads, did my kitchen ever smell heavenly!

I suspect, Gentle Reader, that the finished product would have a slightly different flavor if I'd used sriracha instead of sweet chili sauce because I suspect the hot chili sauce has a flavor profile that more closely matches the hoisin sauce and--shudder--the ketchup. Was my version delicious? Very much!

Gorgeous rice, don't you think?

Speaking of sriracha and hoisin, I fail to understand why this recipe is dubbed sriracha-glazed chicken etc. when sriracha is used in such a small quantity. Why not just call it hoisin-glazed chicken and onions over rice? Is there some strong, preexisting prejudice out there against hoisin sauce? Is Thai food really that much more...sexy for foodies and readers of Cooking Light, in which the recipe was originally published back in April 2005? I mean, I understand from a conversation with my older sister that at one point Thai food really took off because Whitey McWhitey decided it was more healthful than Chinese food.

Or at least that's what she said when I asked why it seemed a certain neighborhood we were driving through in Chicago at that time had a Thai restaurant on every other block. She could have been totally making that up, but it seemed plausible to me.