Chicken and rice #3457098 (congee style)

If congee and Hainanese chicken and rice had a baby

If you know me at all, you’ll know that chicken and rice runs deep in my veins. Rice was of course a staple in our household growing up. It still is. There is rarely a day when rice is not sitting in the cooker, waiting to be spooned into bowls and eaten with ice cold kimchi and crispy seaweed. And while chicken is eaten frequently and voraciously at my parents’ house, its sentiment lies more with me and my little London flat. Here, countless combinations of chicken and rice have been tested and eaten. Knowing that Sunday’s meal would be the only dinner I’d be cooking at home for a week, I could only think of rice cooking in a fragrant chicken broth. The weekend before it had been pho gà. This week I wanted to recreate some of those flavours using what I already had in the fridge. The result? A creamy rice porridge spiked with ginger, garlic, chilli and soy; and softly poached chicken thighs, skin on because we want that extra fat, and when eaten as leftovers for breakfast, a jammy soy-and-chilli marinated egg.