Foodability, Asian style crispy chicken

This is a great way to cook chicken, cause the meat stays moist while the skin is crispy. It also carries a lot more flavour through the meat with out having to marinade it over night. Yes there are two steps to the cooking process but you will not have to spend more than 15 minutes in the kitchen.The most important thing to remember here is, the flavours you want to use are completely up to you or what ever you have sitting around in your pantry. This is an Asian style dish so try using ingredients such as ginger, garlic, lemon, soy sauce, fish sauce, chilly and so forth.

Serves 4
Preparation time 5minutes
Cooking time 35 minutes


Ingredients
1 whole chicken (about 1.5kg)
Water (enough to cover the chicken)
Ginger, 4 or 5 slices ( about 3mm in thickness)
4 cloves of garlic
1 long chilly split in half
1 brown onion peeled and cut in to quarters
1/2 tbsp of salt
4large bok choi
Soy sauce
1 Lemon


1 Bring the water to a boil, if you have a kettle use it because it will save you good 5 minutes.
2 Mean while gather the rest of the ingredients and add them to the water (apart from the chicken).
3 Once the water has come to a boil, (drop the chicken in and make sure it is fully submerged in liquid), keep the flame on high heat until the water has come back to a boil and cook it for a further minute before turning down       the heat to a medium and cook it for about 30 minutes.
4 Once it is cooked remove the chicken from the liquid and let it dry, then strain off 3/4 of the liquid (you can use this liquid/stock for a soup, it should last in the freezer for few weeks).
5 Cut the chicken in to quarters, pat them dry and quickly pan fry them in very hot oil until the skin is golden. Cook one piece out of time to minimise the temperature of the oil reducing.
6 Add the bok choi in to the pot with the 1/4 of the stock,onion, ginger, garlic and chilly and let it sit for no longer
than a minute  before serving.


To serve, create a bed with the Asian greens, onion, ginger, garlic and chilly along with some of the liquid and the chicken on top. Then drizzle some light soy sauce and lemon juice.

WHY Foodability?

Perhaps  you've been at work or at uni. the whole day and the chances are you may have skipped a meal or two, due to the inconvenience of preparing a simple meal or lining up in a line for 10 minutes to get a stack of lettuce and tomato stuck in the middle of two slices of bread. What ever your reason the last thing you want to do is spend hours in a kitchen preparing a meal after a long day that would take 10 minutes to destroy, especially if you dont have a family and the time spent at a dinner table holds less importance.

Hands up if you have made some thing not even fit for a dog yet devoured it out of necessity, only to leave you with a dodgy belly, a feeling of guilt and sorrow for even attempting to cook your self a meal instead of fast food take out or frozen dinners.

We are constantly bombarded with information on what to eat? when to eat? and how much to eat? Soon there will be no choice apart from what the large supermarkets will provide for you and I. Yes there will be the perception of choice, however when companies such as Woolworth has control over the supply chain and now they are telling us what to eat, is it me or shouldn't it be the consumer that should influence what should be on a supermarket shelf? By no means am I trying to tell you where you should shop but it is about informed decision making and the social cost of our decisions today.

So what is foodability? It is about having a basic understanding of what we cook and what we eat, learning the science behind cooking and certain properties of food products. More importantly knowing what you put in your body. Foodability is competency in your cooking and food in general. It is a jorney as individual as once life, I used to be on a diet, used to eat crap,  I was a vegetarian once are some examples.