I have to say that today’s lunch (and extended to dinner) was the best Hainanese chicken rice I’ve done so far. I know now the secret to the yummiest rice—I bought the secret from Fairprice 🤣 For years I struggled with cooking the rice that matches the the the taste of the rice served by the various vendors I patronize in Singapore. It turns out it can be achieved through a packet. OMG, I have wracked my brain for years…

But the chicken itself is a different story. I experimented for years and it was a lot of trial and error. The best technique for me is not to cook a whole chicken if I won’t do it in a huge stock pot and hang the chicken on poultry hooks while it is being poached in liquid with aromatics and its own chicken fat. If I didn’t do it this way, I always end up with a bloody chicken or an overcooked chicken. I instead chop the chicken into manageable sizes, season as usual, then poach it. This way I end up with perfectly cooked skin and inside.

The soup is lovely. My girls and Ate C enjoyed the dish that 1) Ate C had to cook rice again; 2) Twin I went for seconds or thirds even. The ginger sauce/paste I bought from Monterey Community Market and Lee Kum Kee Hoisin sauce completed the dish. *chef’s kiss*

Tomorrow I want to make Nasi Goreng and Nasi Lemak. I need to do a big vegetable shop and I can buy from the veggie shop in UP the lemongrass and pandan that enhance the flavors of Nasi Lemak.

I’m not yet that brave when it comes to cooking Laksa. Rendang I can manage but it does require slow cooking.

Another option for tomorrow is kolo mee, which is basically pancit canton for us in the Philippines. Mee or Mi is the Hokkien/Minnan/Fookien/Fujian word for “noodles”. The Filipino Chinese here call noodle soup mami, which became a generic term but it is actually Ma-Mi, which is a noodle soup dish popularized by a Chinese migrant whose last name is Ma. If I’m not mistaken, he was the founder of Ma Mon Luk in various Chinese enclaves here in Metro Manila.

In Batangas, where my family comes from, we have lomi, which are bigger noodles with thicker soup compared to mami.

The word pancit came from the Fookien words biang shi/biang sik, which refers to food that can be eaten with the hand/flat food. Traditionally, we have dry noodles that were served on banana leaves and we eat it by shoving the noodles into our mouth through a folded banana leaf, kinda like what you do with nan bread or tacos–only you don’t eat the banana leaf. I had this kind of pancit habhab in Quezon province when I went there during one Pahiyas Festival. I remember buying big packs of pancit habhab to bring home because the one I tasted in Lucban, Quezon was delicious.

My daughter, Twin I, said, mommy, why do you know such things??? I told her I am a walking encyclopedia of useless facts. I love reading and researching such things and for some reason I retain them.

That’s also the reason why I can recall deals and so many facts about the companies in the Philippines, their history, who is not in good terms with whom…the tension between the Chinese Filipino tycoons and the old guard Spanish families and that’s why we had two stock exchanges before (Manila Ex and the Makati Ex), which was stupid, really.

I’m the trivia girl. It serves me very well in my job right now.