I’ve recently had a shuffle around of my cookery magazine collection which has been a great opportunity to try out some new recipes. Looking for something relatively quick for a mid week supper, I came across this recipe in the March 2003 Australian Gourmet Traveller.

This is really a slightly glorified fried rice dish but, as is always the case with these things, it’s a pleasant change to follow a recipe and not dump absolutely everything from the spice drawer in the dish!

I adapted the method a little, so that I could prep the chicken in advance and, when it came time to eat, I just cooked the rice and dealt with the vegetables.

Begin by making the marinade for the chicken. In a pan, heat some peanut oil (any flavourless oil will do) and half an onion, thinly sliced. Cook until the onion is soft. Then add some chicken stock. Now, following the recipe, this would be 50mL of chicken stock. However, we have a tendency to buy stock in the 1L containers and not use it which is rather wasteful so instead I bought some sachets of stock paste and I just used one sachet.

Add your chicken stock of choice, followed by a generous teaspoon of ginger paste, chilli to taste (I used chilli flakes, but finely sliced fresh chilli would be lovely), 50mL of white wine vinegar, 1 tsp of caster sugar and ⅛ cup of soy sauce (this is about 30mL, if you prefer). Give this all a stir and bring to the boil. Once boiling, remove from the heat and allow to cool.

There are two approaches to cooking the chicken. I pan fried my chicken breast in one piece which I think was a mistake because it was so huge. Being huge, it was also very uneven in thickness. Of course, had a chopped it into bite size chunks first, I’d have run the risk of over cooking the chunks. So it’s up to you – season your chicken breast and pan fry until cooked and golden. This is the only bit where the chicken gets cooked so you do need to make sure it’s done properly.

Once the chicken is cooked, if it’s in one piece, allow to cool for a few minutes before chopping into bite size chunks. Add the chicken to the onion marinade, coat well and allow to stand for at least an hour.

When you’re ready to eat, cook your rice. Heat a little oil in a wok and fry coarsely sliced spring onions (a whole bunch). As the spring onions start to take on some colour, add the leaves from two bok choy and fry until they start to wilt. Finish by adding the chicken and onion mixture (include the marinade) and mix through the rice.

Ensure everything is hot and serve.

This was great – perfect food as the weather starts changing (in either hemisphere). You may need to adjust the sugar/vinegar balance. I’m naturally very miserly with sugar in recipes and Andy felt that a touch extra sugar would have helped balance out the tartness of the vinegar much better. I’m inclined to agree and so I suggest that you taste the marinade and adjust as you see fit.

To drink – serve with Riesling. If you’ve been generous with the chilli a slightly off dry Riesling would be perfect. My current favourite is the Greywacke, from New Zealand.