We eat a lot of poultry around here. Fish and prawns are the other usual suspects. One way I like my chicken is Ga Luoc (literal translation is boiled chicken). We boil free range chicken and make a dipping sauce for it to eat with rice. It's very tasty (to me anyways :-) The kids like them plain and can eat quite a bit. We eat this dish at least once a week.
How to make Ga Luoc ? it's pretty easy
- 1 free range chicken (about 3 lbs)
- 1 big enough pot to cover the chicken with about 2 inches of clearance from the top rim
- water (fill up to about 1/2 pot)
> Clean and wash chicken.
> Boil water
> Put chicken into the boiling water, make sure it's fully submerged (add more water if need be)
> Wait until the water boil again (bubbling on top) then turn off the stove
> Leave pot on stove, close lid tight and let stand for about 30 min (10 min. per lb)
* My mom taught me to put in a bit of tumeric powder into the water when it boil, before putting the chicken in. The color from the tumeric gave the chicken skin a soft golden yellow tint (the way how my mom remembers chicken looks like back in Vietnam). I have gotten use to my mom's chicken so we eat them yellow too :) I heard tumeric is good for you so all is good !
Remove chicken from pot and submerge into a bowl of cold water. Let chicken cool then chop to bite size pieces (or debone it and cut the meat into bite size pieces)
Ginger and kaffir lime leaves dipping sauce:
- 1 1/2 inch of ginger (thinly sliced, or sliced and chopped to tiny pieces)
- 5-6 lime leaves (thinly sliced)
- black pepper
Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. You can divide up the sauce into smaller bowl after so each person has their own dipping bowl. Then each person can add more fish sauce, chili, ginger, etc. as they like.
If you have time, use the water you cooked the chicken in (chicken broth ?) and use it to cook rice ! It'll make the rice quite tasty ! Yum !
We usually make a squash or veggies soup with the chicken broth (season with fish sauce, of course) and make a sauteed green veggies dish and that's dinner for us. This is quite easy to make and not greasy/fatty ! We remove most of the skin when eat (I only eat the thin one, it's so good).
