I want to love this dish and I would certainly eat it again in the future.
This dish tasted great, was seasoned fairly well, looked beautiful but, it was a horrorshow to make.
Let me repeat- this. dish. was. a. horrorshow. to. make.
When I was prepping the produce I marveled at how beautiful the produce combination looked on the cutting board. As I prepped the vegetables the scent of the chopped ginger and garlic was intoxicating.
Personally, I will never make this dish again despite how good it tasted in the end.
Critique:
1) Prep time was NOT fifteen minutes as the recipe dictates.
It was more than 30 minutes by the time I was done with my chicken-drama (see critique 2), washing, cutting, and readying the other ingredients for cooking.
2) The packaging of the boneless, skinless chicken breasts was for lack of a better word was terrible.
It was vacuum sealed in a thick, black, plastic package. There is no "open here" tab where you can separate and open the vacuum seal as similar vacuum sealed products have. Instead you need to cut it with scissors to open.
I started by cutting one end of the bag and the vacuum seal was not broken. Onward to cutting a second side to break the vacuum seal.
After I finished cutting the packaging open thick, gloopy, pale red/brown/pink "stuff" the chicken breasts were stored with started to slowly leak out (there was also a surprising amount of it in the package- unnecessary amount really). It was almost the consistency of maple syrup. It was rather disconcerting.
The thick liquid ended up getting stopped up behinds the chicken breasts due to the way I cut the packaging. When I went to drain the package further out popped the chicken breasts into the sink.
Luckily, they fell into my prep sink which tends to be a little cleaner. I ended up doing a quick hail mary save before they went into the sink drain (as they were sliding rapidly towards the drain in the excessive amount of maple syrup consistency goop it was originally stored in).
The five second rule was employed and I rinsed the chicken off (I never rinse raw meat off due to the risk of splashing around bacteria which can cause entero illnesses-this is the first time I have done it since finding this factoid out in nursing school).
After rinsing the chicken off and adding it to the frying pan to cook I proceeded to worry about entero bacteria and had to employ the assistance of my husband to turn on the sink water and squirt antibacterial hand-soap into my hands so I could wash them since they were covered in maple syrup consistency chicken juice.
3) Once I finished step one of the recipe which was the preparation of ingredients I skipped step 2 in the recipe directions as I did not want to wash my hands again after handling the raw chicken when adding it to the pan to cook (which is step 3 in the directions).
I feel that the steps should be adjusted to account for this to help reduce possible cross contamination of foods when cooking- especially the rice which is cooked primarily on low heat once the liquid has come to a boil.
4) The packaging for the sweet chili sauce had leaked as it was not sealed correctly and made a mess of the other "knick knacks" items (ponzu sauce container, ginger packaging, coconut milk powder package). I would like to have seen a different package choice be utilized such as a sealed package you can cut with scissors or tear one end off of and squirt the sauce out (similar to Newman's Own single serving salad dressings you can buy at a cafe to go with to-go/ pre-made salads).
5) It was dangerous pan-frying the chicken and vegetables as the oil in the pan overheated quickly (as suggested I had set the stove temp on medium-high) and bits of oil were splashing up out of the pan onto the stove and also on my arms as I attempted to stir the cooking food in the pan. I ended up utilizing a really long wooden spoon and performed what looked like a sad attempt at fencing. I felt tempted to shout "En-garde!" as I was attempting to stir the ingredients. I likely would have if I didn't have my 13 week old sleeping down the hall ;-)
5) The coconut rice....oh that coconut rice. What a stressful time cooking that was. My husband actually came over and hugged me while I was cooking because he could hear me saying, "you dirty bird" and requesting him to get more paper towels ASAP as I had used the rest of the roll mopping up the mess.
The mess arises from the reconstituted coconut milk boiling over the pot and all over the stove once the jasmine rice had been added after the mixture was boiling and the heat reduced to low with the cover placed on the pot.
The coconut milk smelled terrible as it burned on the stove and made a lot of smoke. I had to think quick, wet a bunch of paper towels and lift the pot off the burner to do some quick swipes with the damp cloth to stop the burning process. This is most likely not the best thing to have done as I ran the risk of cracking my ceramic cook-top due to the temperature differential.
I wasn't thinking about anything except for the smoke setting off the fire alarms and the terrible smell.
The directions for the recipe states that once covered, "cook 12-14 minutes or until the liquid has been absorbed and the rice is tender".
Maybe it was the extra fluid that had boiled over but the rice took a lot longer than 12-14 minutes to cook. Once I hit 14 minutes I had noticed the rice had turned into a lumpy/thick mass of rice and was not tender when taste tested.
I ended up slowly adding more water and cooking for a longer period of time. I am guessing it took about 25-30 minutes to cook.
The final product was tender but, did not fluff up nicely with a fork and remained a creamy textured, coconut flavored, lumpy mass of rice. You can see a bit of the lumpy rice above in the picture of the final product once it was plated.
When plating our meal we decided to use a bowl and place the rice on the bottom and the stir-fry on top.
I ended up mixing the rice and stir-fry together to help break apart the rice and distribute more evenly since the rice mass was a bit too intense in the coconut flavor department when eaten by itself.
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