One-dish Chinese meals
By Harkiran Sodhi

THE Chinese are adept at taking a dish and making it complete in all senses. It is complete in flavour and can be eaten by itself and is nutritionally complete as well. Chinese food as we eat it is not what is eaten on a daily basis by the native Chinese. We tend to overload the table and ourselves with the effort of cooking many dishes, and often the end result is that there are too many dishes and our taste buds have an overdose of conflicting flavours and get confused.

The best Chinese food really is what the Chinese themselves eat on a daily basis. This usually is either rice or noodles cooked with vegetables or meat, chicken or seafood to make the entire dish complete in itself. This is also a time-saving way of cooking as all that has to be prepared is one dish. This also means that all the effort can be concentrated on making this one dish as tasty and wholesome as possible. Today we will give you some recipes, which do all this and more. These are really complete meals in one dish and are either rice or noodle-based with all sorts of accompaniments put into them. The result is a dish you can savour for a long time afterwards as well.

Vegetable rice

Serves 4-6 persons

Ingredients

2 tablespoons oil

1 onion sliced fine

1 piece of ginger chopped fine

4 cloves of garlic peeled and sliced fine

1 ½ cup of good quality long grained rice

salt to taste

250 gms of fresh green vegetables as available, sliced finely. These can be cabbage, spinach, beans, capsicum etc as per your preference.

Method

Heat the oil in a kadai and add in the chopped onion, ginger and garlic. Fry these on a high flame for thirty seconds to a minute, stirring constantly. Add in the rice and mix it well so that each grain gets coated with the oil mixture. Add in hot water onto this till it coves the rice completely. Add in salt to taste and cover the kadai and leave it till it comes to boiling point. Uncover the kadai and let the rice simmer on a low flame for 5-7 minutes. Add in the chopped green vegetables and cook on a low flame for another 7-9 minutes, or till the rice is cooked. Drain any excess water that is left and serve hot. As accompaniments you can serve soya sauce, chilly sauce or sesame seed oil.

Prawn fried rice

Serves 4

Ingredients

3 tablespoons oil

3 spring onions chopped fine

125 gm of button mushrooms washed and sliced

3 eggs beaten well

60 gm of boiled shredded chicken

60 gm of frozen prawns which have been thawed out

60 gm green peas shelled

4 cups long grain rice which has been boiled and drained

1 tablespoon soya sauce

Method

Heat the oil in a kadai. Add in the chopped spring onions and cook for a few seconds. Add in the sliced mushrooms and cook for a further thirty seconds. Add in the beaten eggs to this and scramble lightly over a low flame. Put this onto a plate and keep it aside. Add the remaining ingredients i.e. the shredded chicken, thawed prawns, peas, the cooked rice and the soya sauce into the kadai and stir them well for a couple of minutes.

Put the egg, onion and mushroom mixture cooked earlier into the kadai on top of all this and cook the entire dish for about a minute. Serve it hot as a complete meal. The traditional way to boil rice the Chinese way is as follows.

430 gms or 2 cups of rice

½ teaspoon of salt.

Wash the rice well in water. Put this into a heavy-bottomed pan with the salt and cover it with water till the water is 2 cm or ¾ of an inch above the level of the rice. Bring this to the boiling point and then lower the flame to a medium flame. Cook till the water has almost evaporated and little steam holes appear all over the cooking rice. Reduce the flame to a minimum, cover the pan with a lid, which is snug fitting, and steam the rice for 10-15 minutes till it is tender. Try not to lift the lid till the end. Leave the rice covered and off the flame for 4-5 minutes and then remove it with a light touch. Once cooked this will give you almost 6 cups or 750 gms of rice.

This feature was published on October 3, 1999