How my granny made it, a long time ago.
I remember going to my granny’s house when I was a young boy, and she would make the best chicken and rice. As a teenager I assumed this dish was simple – chicken, rice, and water – but as I made this cheap dish more often throughout my twenties, I began to see its simplicity more as a refined comfort that warms your belly and soul for a maximum of 1 day; it doesn’t keep well for long because the rice is in so much liquid, so don’t make too much more than you will eat that day.
Ingredients
- onion
- long-grain white rice
- salt and black pepper
- unsalted butter
- traditional method:
- water
- 1 whole chicken
- lazy method:
- unsalted chicken stock
- even mixture of boneless breasts and thighs
Method
The first girl I made it for was shocked; she had expected something more elegant, I guess something more along the lines of what might appeal to the French. So, the first step will be to know your audience because you may need to familiarize them with what to expect. This process ideally should begin at least a day before you decide to make this dish.
Before you can make my incredibly savory and “undelectable” chicken and rice dish you must gather all the ingredients. It is a simple and effective combination of basic ingredients used for generations by all cultures of people. I don’t know all the history of this dish—that’s not what this book is about. The goal here is to make sure the family eats before midnight because every time I say I need to chop an onion my wife laughs at me. She is so fast and efficient in the kitchen. She will take 30 minutes to make a dish that would take me hours to make.
First, you need to decide if you are doing the traditional method or the lazy method. There is no visible shame in the lazy method, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you are lazy. Maybe you worked all day, or maybe you don’t feel like doing all the work involved with the traditional method because you are lazy. It doesn’t matter. But if you are doing the traditional method then you will need to get a whole damn chicken. Get a big one. However, if you are doing the lazy method, regardless of whether you are truly lazy or not, you will need to get some chicken breasts and chicken thighs.
The reason for this is because you want a balance of white and dark meat. If you are one of these people who claim they can’t see color, you might have a hard time sorting this out so please seek help. You are missing the skin in the lazy method, so you will render less fat in this version of the dish, so look at you, your lazy ass helped you get healthier for once.
Start by chopping the onion. Maybe you’ll chop two. It depends on a few factors such as how much time you have, how big your chicken is (or how many pieces of random chickens you purchased because you’re lazy), and how much you love onions. I don’t necessarily love onions, but I always like to add them to my dishes. If you have a problem with onions, I don’t think the recipe would be ruined if you left out the onions. It’s up to you.
Set a large knife on a cutting board and then go pick out an onion. It doesn’t matter what type of onion—yellow, white, purple— but I typically always go for the sweet, yellow Vidalia onions because I grew up near Vidalia, Georgia. Now that I think of it, purple onions would probably not be that good in this so don’t use purple. It wouldn’t NOT work, it, just, I don’t know, I’ve always thought purple onions were better for raw applications like salads or tacos.
Once you’ve chosen your onion, cut the onion using your preferred method of cutting an onion. I won’t get into my preferred method because it’s not important to this recipe, and plus, we need to have dinner ready at a reasonable time tonight. But I will say this, it’s most preferable to have finely diced onions in my opinion. It doesn’t matter, I don’t even think my granny put onions in her chicken and rice dish.
In the essence of time some might say that what’s next should have been the first step, but I feel like chopping the onion is good to just get out of the way, and plus, you may want to sauté the onion before proceeding to the next step. My granny almost certainly did not do this, but it could add more flavor.
Put the chicken in an appropriately sized pot and cover generously with water (or chicken stock if you’re being lazy) and boil the living hell out of it. Trust me—there will be some hell living in that chicken, and you need to boil that out. This could take anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours. That’s the beauty of this recipe; after you bring it to a boil you can let it simmer while you walk away to get some other work done.
When you feel good about how long the chicken has boiled, when there’s no more hell in it, you’re going to need to prepare to debone the chicken. This is a critical juncture that will make or break this dish. Because if you serve this dish with small chicken bones and ligaments, it will be a huge turnoff, and you will not want to make the dish again. This is a good reason to do the lazy method, come to think of it, because you have paid someone else to process the chicken with mechanical tools to ensure there are no bones that will ruin the carefree experience of each spoonful melting in your mouth. This is also why you would want to use chicken stock instead of water, because you aren’t gaining the flavor from boiling the bones. If you used the boneless chicken, then your next step will be to simply pick it apart with a fork and a spatula while it’s still in the pot; you could also take it out, shred it on a cutting board, and put it back in. If you used the whole chicken, then you will want to strain the liquid into another pot being sure to save it, and then manually debone the chicken before putting it back in the liquid. The goal here is to have shredded chicken with only a few bite-sized chunks. If you did the traditional method, you don’t necessarily have to remove all the skin, but those are not going to be the most desirable pieces to eat, so you may want to remove the big chunks of skin and toss them in the garbage.
Once you’ve reconstituted the chicken and liquid sans the bones and ligaments, you can let it simmer for however long you want. Now is when you would want to add some salt and black pepper. Don’t mess this up by adding any herbs because you will ruin it. Aside from making sure the liquid doesn’t evaporate you don’t have to get back into action until thirty minutes before you’re ready to eat. But don’t forget—we’ve got to make sure dinner is ready before bedtime, preferably hours before bedtime to avoid going to bed on a full stomach.
The necessary ratio of rice-to-water is usually always 2-to-1. That means two cups of water and one cup of rice. For this chicken and rice dish, you’re going to need to make that 4-to-1½. Yes, four cups of liquid to one-and-a-half cups of rice. You can fudge with this a little bit, but don’t go more than a half of a cup off or you will not achieve the correct consistency for this dish.
Drop the rice into the pot and give it all a good stir. If you used the lazy method, you might want to drop in a stick of butter. If you deboned the chicken, you might still want a half of a stick of butter.
This is a dish that will be most enjoyable to eat right away. You can put the leftovers in the fridge to reheat the next day, but the rice will become bloated and mushy. If you want to get more leftover mileage from this dish, I suppose you could simply adjust your ratio of rice-to-water to prevent the rice from bloating so quickly, but then you’re not making chicken and rice, and I thought that’s why you read all of this.
Also, do not put cheese on this. My wife added shredded cheese to her bowl the first time I made it for her, and it totally ruined the whole dinner; not so much taste-wise, but I ruined the whole dinner by bitching about how she put cheese on my sacred chicken and rice dish.
