Hunk Food: Chinese Style Chicken and Egg Fried Rice

Chinese. Another classic takeaway option for the hungry student. Who doesn’t love a deep fried sweet and sour chicken ball, or some deep fried prawn toast, or a fat deep fried spring roll (do you see where I’m going with this). Chinese food can be pretty unhealthy.

And here’s a fun fact for you: Have you ever had chest pains, dizziness or headaches after guzzling down some takeout Chinese food? If you had, it’s because you’ve been consuming MSG, a food additive that’s often added to Chinese takeaways to enhance the flavour. Scientists are bickering about the health benefits/ dangers of MSG, but until they decide what’s wrong with it why not just make your own Chinese food and save yourself the worry.

I’d like to add that China is not one of the countries I’m fortunate enough to be from, so if you want more authentic Chinese food, I might not be the best source of information. But I can promise to provide you a Chinese style dish that is perfect for a student budget.

The key to this recipe is the marinade. Sounds like a daunting and long winded word for a student, but this cheats marinades can be quick and simple, and don’t involve any overnight preparation, meaning you can knock out a delicious dish in half an hour. So here’s how.

You will need:

• 1 pack chicken thighs (will make enough for at least two meals)
• Cut up peppers (I used half a green and half a red)
• ½  cup rice
• ½ cup frozen peas

• ½ head broccoli
• 1 egg

A few spring onions, choppedFor the marinade:

• 2 cloves garlic, chopped finely (you can see in the picture that I failed to do this)
• A large glug of soy sauce (soy sauce and honey are a solid investment, so get down to Sainsburys and spend the £3.18 it will cost for you to buy both of them)
• A generous squidge of honey

How to make:

1. Fill up a kettle and put to boil for the rice. Measure out half a cup of rice and fill the cup with water to soak. This will help it to cook faster.
2. Turn on the oven to a high temperature.
3. Cut off the excess/all of the fat on the chicken thighs and rub some salt and pepper on them. In a bowl, mix together the marinade ingredients. Taste it- if it tastes like something you’d actually like to eat on your chicken, great, if it’s too salty add more honey, too sweet more soy sauce. You can also add a capful of white wine vinegar if you have any lying around, but I’m guessing this is unlikely.
4. When the kettle is boiled, pour into a pan, add some salt and chuck in the rice. There is a fancy method of cooking rice called the absorption method, which involves putting just enough water in the pan that it soaks it all up and you don’t have to drain your rice. I do not understand this method. The amount of water will depend on the type of rice you’ve bought and very often you end up either burning your rice, or thinking it’s done because there’s not more water yet only to discover that it’s not actually cooked. So if you want to avoid this, pour as much water as you like into the pan- it doesn’t take any longer, especially if you’ve already soaked the rice.
5. Put a pan on to heat up with a drizzle of olive oil. You can either dip the chicken in the marinade first before frying, but it’s probably a bit quicker to fry them without. Add the peppers. This should take about 5-10 minutes. Avoid too much oil to stop it splattering back up at you.
6. When the chicken’s pretty much done, empty it into an ovenproof dish, and pour over the marinade, making sure every piece is fully coated. Pop into the oven so it gets sticky.
7. In the last 5 minutes of your rice, add the broccoli to the same pan. Drain both.
8. In your chicken pan, pour in the rice and broccoli and add the peas. Squirt a touch of soy sauce, and add a whisked egg. Mix around until you can see the egg is cooked and it looks like egg fried rice.
9. By this time you chicken will be done, so take out of the oven, serve up and enjoy!