The dream team
Diana salutes chicken and rice, a classic combination that unlocks a world of easy and adaptable dinners
THE STAPLE I GREW UP WITH wasn’t rice, but potatoes. There was a big jar of basmati, but it was used as a percussion instrument when my siblings and I put on concerts (it accompanied our rendition of Little Donkey every Christmas). We didn’t eat rice until my mum got into what was then thought of as glamorous foreign food – goulash and chilli and Madhur Jaffrey’s Mughlai chicken – and we cooked it badly. I don’t know where this approach came from, but we drained the cooked rice in a sieve, then ran cold water through it, followed by boiling water. This was done very carefully so we actually ended up with a bowl of rice that had separate little grains. But we were better at potatoes. Now there are eight bags of different types of rice in my cupboard: jasmine rice, basmati, several kinds of risotto rice (carnaroli, vialone nano and arbo-
‘Chicken and rice’ rolls off the tongue, as if the two were meant to be together rio all produce different results) and a couple of kinds of paella rice. The rice used for paella, and other Spanish rice dishes, is a marvel. It must not be stirred. You just leave it to drink in the stock and other flavours around it, until you have grains swollen with umami. There are 40,000 varieties of rice, categorised in different ways: by fragrance, where it’s grown – under water or on hillsides, for example – texture (sticky or not), grain size and shape. ‘Chicken and rice’, like ‘tea and toast’, rolls off the tongue, as if the two were meant to be together. All over the globe, they’re joined – it’s an elemental combination. Neither chicken nor rice is strongly flavoured, so the cook can take these basics and dress them up. If you google ‘chicken and rice’, your head will spin. You could make a different dish
every day of the year: Turkish chicken and rice pilaf with dill, chicken and sausage jambalaya, chicken biryani, arroz con pollo (I must have cooked this a thousand times). There are Iranian baked rice and chicken dishes, which are more complicated and can contain yogurt. They’re turned out so the tah dig, the crusty rice from the bottom of the pan (much prized), can be seen. The most useful chicken and rice dishes to know about, because they’re so adaptable, are pilafs, where the rice is cooked by the absorption method (as in the recipe on p43), Spanish rice dishes, which don’t need much attention, and fried rice dishes (if you can make egg and chicken fried rice, you’ll never throw out leftover rice again). I also put chicken – just the shreds from a leftover roast – in risottos to make another meal out of not very much. Then there are baked chicken and rice dishes. I make a huge range of these with very different flavours, an approach I started when I had my first child. This is good ‘cooking in exhaustion’ food as it all goes into the oven. You must stick to specific measurements but can alter the character of the dish at will. Use a 30cm-wide shallow casserole, 175g basmati rice (washed in a sieve until the water runs clear) and 550ml boiling stock. Sauté onion and garlic before adding the rice, and anything else you fancy – aubergine, pumpkin or mushrooms – plus spices and flavourings. Try something as simple as pumpkin, ginger and chilli, then add the rice and stock. Put bone-in chicken thighs – they can be browned or, if you’re in a hurry, left raw (season them with sea salt to make the skin crunchy) – on top and bake at 180C fan for 40-45 minutes. The chicken will be golden, the stock absorbed and the rice tender. It’s a great blueprint recipe. A couple of days later you can make something completely different using the same basic components. If you have chicken and rice, good eating is never far away.
Key to dietary information VG Vegan 38
V
Vegetarian
DF Dairy-free
GF Gluten-free
If you can’t get butifarra sausage, use spicy Italian sausages or, failing that, any good-quality spicy sausage
Document: 1038CC-STMMA-1-160122-A038C-XX.pdf;Format:(205.00 x 260.00 mm);Date: 11.Jan 2022 14:23:13; Telegraph
Diana Henry Stella’s award-winning food writer
