Inspiration🔗

Let's play a game. Pretend you haven't seen the title and don't know what's for this week. I will give you dots that inspired the development of the dish. Can you connect the dots and find the answer?

1. Protein is good for tissue and muscle repair. Chicken is a good option.
2. Colorful veggies cooked in tomato sauce are really appetizing.
3. A and I took a walkie to his work for lunch last Friday. I had chicken quarter and Ratatouille (OK, this is a giveaway)

It's an easy one, right? That's why it's so natural for me to come up with this one: chicken braised in tomato sauce with veggies in Ratatouille style. In terms of cooking method, it's very similar to meatballs and Sunday sauce we did a week ago. Once you've tasted the symbiosis power of meat and tomato sauce, namely tomato sauce keeps meat juicy and meat juice makes tomato sauce flavorful, it becomes your favorite tool in the arsenal that's creatively applied whenever possible.

Ingredients🔗

I used chicken thighs for the dish. It's actually the first time I've ever cooked with chicken thighs. It's the right choice for the use case. Not only does the thigh have more flavor from its higher fat content (most of the animal flavor comes from fat), the connective tissues protect the meat from overcooking and drying out. In fact, low-temperature long-time braising does amazing things: i) melts down fat that makes richer sauce; ii) dissolves connective tissues into gelatin that thickens sauce; iii) tenderizes meat by simmering it in the rich and thick sauce. You see there is a positive feedback loop happening between the symbiotic duo.

Speaking of chicken thighs, allow me to have a moment with my beloved Mom and Dad (I know they will be having this moment as they are always my keen readers).

YY to Mommy Cat and Daddy Pig¹: Do you know that here in the U.S. chicken thighs are actually cheaper than chicken breasts? Strange new world, Huh? Imagine you can buy pieces that are all thighs. No more fighting for thighs right? Why, you wonder. It's simply demand driving price. Unlike us, Americans prefer chicken breast because it's leaner, higher in protein. Still why, you ask. Let's just say the country has a large proportion of muscle heads who value their protein intake more than "Yum, chicken thigh". Anyway, lucky us, if you were here, we'd all Om Nom Nom on chicken thighs.

Still remember back then on weekends we'd stew a whole chicken in clear soup. I always got the thigh pieces that were so tender and tasty. The big white breast pieces were always the least popular because they were dry and stringy. But Dad would eat them anyway because he wanted to save the tasty pieces for me and Mom.

After knowing a thing or two about cooking, it's not chicken breast's fault for being less tasty. It's simply that different cuts of meat require different cooking methods. Long-time stewing / braising is good for fattier or tougher meat like chicken thigh. But it's not the way for leaner cuts like chicken breast because they don't have enough fat to keep moisture from being drawn out during the long cooking. That's why cooking time and temperature are so crucial to chicken breasts. You want to pull them out of heat the minute their internal temperature gets 160F to keep the maximal juiciness.

YY to Mommy Cat and Daddy Pig: Now you see why stewing whole chicken is doomed for breast pieces. Not sure if you still get the whole chicken or they sell separate cuts now. Either way, the underscored message is do not stew chicken breasts, pan sear them instead, and pull them out as soon as they are done. Hopefully this way you get to enjoy chicken breasts as well.

Back to the other ingredients. The veggies are

• 1 large white onion
• 5ish rainbow carrots
• 1 large zucchini

Best veggie nominee goes to

Drumroll...

Rainbow carrots! They are so colorful and so appetizing.

A: I'd always want rainbow carrots. Normal carrots are just carrots. Rainbow carrots are better.

For the sauce, I used 1 6oz can tomato paste and 1 14oz can tomato sauce. I find this ratio is a good starting point for braising. Not too thin, not too thick. Right after braising the sauce may appear runnier than before. But after cooling down or the next day, the consistency gets perfect. This is due to gelatin in the sauce only sets after it’s cooled down.

One-Pan🔗

Having just made meatballs last week, it's easy peasy this time as it's pretty much the same drill.

1. Sear chicken thighs, just to brown surface, and squeeze out lovely chicken fat
2. Sauté the veggies in chicken fat
3. Add in tomato paste to fry with veggie for couple of minutes then deglaze the pan with tomato sauce
4. Return seared thighs to pan, submerge in the sauce
5. Lid on pan in 400F oven for 30min

I like the one-pan finish-in-the-oven method. You incrementally build up flavor as cooking goes along. Nothing gets lost in the transfer and no extra dishes to clean. While it finishes up in the oven, you get hands free to clean stuff. It's nice to enjoy a long-prepared meal without cleaning left to do afterwards.

Have you noticed it's "one-pan" instead of "one-pot" where the pot is our normal stew vessel dutch oven pot? Ta-da, let me introduce our new gear, made.in 3qt saucier (not affiliated but sponsors are welcomed). Originally this was meant to replace the small pot we usually use for cooking small amounts of rice or porridge. But its shape is more of a pan than a pot, wide and low with rounded bottom, which is actually perfect for "one-pan" application. The wide bottom has the same surface area as our 10in frying pan, large enough to sear meat. The low height is in pot standard. It's definitely the tall guy in the pan world. The rounded bottom gives more surface area higher up, useful for braising. The rounded shape makes stirring veggies and scraping sauce very easy, nothing sticks. Overall, I'm very happy with the pan. It has very good heat conductivity for quick searing, decent volume for a 4-day 2-pp entree portion of stew, and easy cleaning like a charm. Again not affiliated but highly recommended.

one-pan in the oven it goes

Chicken and Rice🔗

To serve with chicken, I cooked a pot of farro and brown rice, namely fancy grain melody. Truth is we are running low on farro so I made up with brown rice. As always, there are cashews and grated ginger with rice.

steam broccolini when rice is done	chicken and rice

1. The original - first day stew always has runnier sauce, not a bug but a feature when you have rice to soak up the yummy sauce.
   Chicken internal temperature just registered 175F when out of the oven. Perfect timing! Super juicy and tender. I like the grain melody by accident. Farro has nutty flavor and texture (Nutty is to describe both if it makes sense. In terms of texture, I guess it's closest to Al-dente). Brown rice has that lovely bran-like skin and also some nuttiness to it, but less so than farro. Cashews after cooking become soft and creamy with almost a vanilla flavor. Together there is heterogeneity in texture and flavor that really deserve the name melody.
2. The tomato - top with heirloom tomatoes, almost like a salad of itself, so juicy and sweet
3. The egg - add soft-boiled egg, rice bowl style

Magnum Opus🔗

The post should have ended here. After three days, we finished all the chicken pieces. There is still plenty of stew sauce left and one portion of rice. A natural course is to add more protein to the sauce and cook more rice. However, that's quite some time and work. Just like many of great inventions come from smart laziness, I set out to MacGyver a quick dinner with what's at hand but turned out to be the Magnum Opus.

Let me share how I came up with this brilliant creation. It's all from the lazy chef's clever instinct. Looking at the clearly-not-enough-for-two rice at the bottom of the pot, I ponder how to augment its volume without cooking a new batch. Wait, leftover rice, quick cooking, it's something I've done before. It's on the very first entry of this blog, the very original fried rice waffle. So, we have

• leftover grain melody
• 50g flour + 3 eggs - for batter
• grated ginger + garlic seasoning + dried onion - shortcut Asian flavors for fried rice, S&P of course
• more than half zucchini - diced
• oat - after mixing the above for a while, salt makes zucchini release quite some water, oat is the perfect sponge absorb the extra moisture
• 15g sesame oil - rule of thumb, 15-20g oil per 2 waffles

Once the fried rice waffle idea sets in, the rest naturally follows. The stew sauce is the "syrup" for the waffle. Doesn't hurt to throw some cheese for both cheesy rice and tomato cheese pizza vibe. As for the protein, just like last time, of course it is the very best Shanghainese XLB.

Such an interesting texture, nutty farro, chewy rice, soft cashew, supple zucchini, oat flakes, all bond together by eggs, crispy edges and soft center, so many textural variances in one bite.	Tomato sauce is like the savory maple syrup that brings so much flavor, you have the base layer flavor from waffle's Asian seasoning, and on top of that the strong savory tomato layer, what an intricate and complex flavor profile.

Cheese is a common friend to rice and tomato sauce	Mmm... XLBs...

Reproduce🔗

The post should have ended here. However, good engineering instinct tells me it's important to know how to reproduce something, whether it's a bug or surprise. Indeed, " It works in my kitchen" wouldn't be too useful. So I set out to reproduce my Magnum Opus so it's no longer a legend but a regular.

First, I'd like to remove the dependency of leftover rice. It's a strong assumption that's not always met. How can we have something that resembles cooked grain but doesn't take grain's long cooking time? Well, my friends, oat is your friend. Oats can transform from hydrated to fully cooked to super cooked in just a matter of minutes. Each form has its use case. Here we can use fully cooked oats to replace cooked grain. They have a similar soft texture and binding effect. However, as fully cooked grains are almost saturated with water, they cannot absorb extra moisture release from veggies, so we will still use dried oats as sponge, also more textural contrast. Here is the batter formula for 2 big waffles.

• 75g oats + 50g nuts[cashew] + enough water fully soak everything with extra - microwave 3min till fully cooked
• 35g flour[buckwheat] + 3 eggs + seasoning[Asian] - mix to form batter
• enough veggies[1/2 zucchini + 2 carrots] to make 4 cups of total batter volume - cube or grate veggies for easy mixing
• 20g oil[sesame]

It's a template with [ ] for customization. The only fix variables are

1. dried ingredient weight (150g in total, 75g fully cooked) - the ratio gives a good batter consistency, easy to work with, soft but not floppy
2. total batter volume (4 cups) - the amount for two big waffles

Just for reference, the total batter weight is 800g. The weight varies depending on what kind of veggies you use. That's why I recommend using volume as a measure of how much veggies you need.

4-cup Pyrex measuring cup

The only missing part is the nutty farro. That's hard to approximate with oats. Still great texture and amazing flavor. Look at the buckwheat black freckles, zucchini pieces poking out and colorful carrot shreds.	Tomato sauce is such a good pair with rice.

Healthy and tasty usually don't go hand-in-hand. This one is an exception. I will call this a successful product. Both A and I agree to ship it! Well, metaphorically. I hope you can use the template to create some version of your own. Just like where we started, tomato braised chicken has so many names because it's a good template and thus every country has their own version of it. Maybe in the future, waffle and dumpling will gain popularity because of you.

Let's have a cheesy finish.

¹ nicknames we call each other, I'm the Little Cat, Mom is the Mommy Cat, and Dad was born on Year Pig