easy "claypot" chicken rice in rice cooker

The last 2 weekends have been somewhat exhausting. The last weekend in October was the fleamarket, which went well. Although I spent most of the time seated under the shade of an umbrella, it was a very hot day and I sweated buckets. At the end of the day I felt like I had run miles on the treadmill.

This weekend, we went to MacRitchie Reservoir to check out the treetops trail. It was a 5 km trek through a gravel nature trail to the tree tops suspension bridge and another 5 km trek around the reservoir to get back. The way back was more enjoyable and picturesque because part of it was a comfortable boardwalk beside the water. Nonetheless, it was a challenging 4 hour trek, as some parts of the trail were uphill and the ground was mostly muddy and slippery due to the rainy weather. I would not recommend this trail for young children and the elderly. Needless to say, I feel all sorts of aches and pain now. But I am glad we did it. It was much needed exercise for me :)

Since I have no knitting or sewing, I will show you our first attempt at cooking "claypot" chicken rice in the rice cooker. This is how it looked like in the rice cooker when it was done. By the way, this dish is traditionally cooked in a claypot, hence the name, claypot chicken rice.

There are lots of recipes for this if you google. I put 2 cups of washed short grain rice in the rice cooker and added the required amount of water. Next, I fried some slices of ginger and some cloves of peeled garlic, then added chopped chicken, a mixture of sesame oil, light and dark soya sauce into the pan and gave everything a quick stir fry, to give it a "fried fragrance", but not long enough to cook the chicken. The chicken mixture was added to the rice cooker and then the rice cooker was turned on. When the water in the rice cooker was beginning to boil off, I added sliced lap cheong (dried pork sausage), yuen cheong (dried liver sausage), sliced siew yoke (roast pork) and siow pai chye into the rice cooker. After the rice had cooked, and the rice cooker had turned to " keep warm" mode, I waited for about another 20 minutes for the vegetable to cook and soften.

I have heard about cooking claypot chicken rice in the rice cooker but I have not tried it before as I doubted that it would be tasty and feared that the chicken might not be sufficiently cooked. Well, my worries were unfounded. It turned out deliciously fragrant and the chicken was well-cooked. And, it isn't as oily as it looks. In fact, it is quite a healthy way of cooking because I didn't use any oil for cooking. Only sesame seed oil was used as seasoning. I'm definitely cooking this again as it is a simple one pot meal and my kids loved it. Next time we will skip the siew yoke and add shitake mushrooms and salted fish.