Chicken with bamboo shoots

As everyone knows, you can’t live on memories alone. And I can’t live on the thought of yesterday’s cheeseburger. A man’s got to have some grub. Choosing what to make was easy because yesterday I’d bought a chicken breast to cook for Ninka’s lunch. Except Ninka had lunch at her mum’s and only had supper at mine.

Meanwhile, I already had the chicken. Once I knew she wouldn’t be eating here, I cut it into little pieces and marinated it. I had my cheeseburger, after all. But I figured I could do something quick with the chicken in a frying pan, vaguely Chinese-style.

As you know, I’ve spent a bit of time in China, and I know you can eat pretty much anything, in pretty much any combination. Funnily enough, in the 5 months I spent in China (over two trips), I only got food poisoning once, and even then it was mild. It happened in Leshan while we were waiting for enlightenment to dawn on the Giant Buddha. What I mean is, my mate and I got there at night, so to see him we had to wait until the next day.

So we went “out on the town”, as they say. We ate at one of the street barbecues. For better or worse, back then (in 2004) a white tourist on a Chinese street at night was a rare sight. As specimens of zoological interest, we caught the eye of two Chinese men and a Chinese woman, who came and sat with us. They didn’t speak a word of English. The funny thing was, one had a Slayer T-shirt and kept pointing at it and yelling “Meeeetaaaallicaaaaa!”

Anyway, what mattered wasn’t what he yelled but what they offered us. I’ve eaten all sorts in China: frogs on sticks, snakes of some description, every kind of seafood, locusts and other insects… But I reckon it was the snack they gave us with our beer that did me in. Crisps. Black crisps. Hot as hell. Made from little black beetles. I wouldn’t say they were bad. But for three days I couldn’t drink a beer, much to my travelling companion’s distress.

A friend of mine had worse luck in China a few years earlier. He got such bad food poisoning he ended up in hospital. But that’s another, really rather dramatic story, which I’ll definitely write down for you one day.

Back to the point. Sometimes I like to cook something that gets the kitchen stinking of soy sauce, so that’s what I marinated the chicken in. Pretty good, quick to make. It wouldn’t fill up a panda, but it’s plenty for a decent supper.

At a glance:

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Serves: 1 person. If you want more, use more of everything

How many calories? Don’t stress

Ingredients for chicken breast with bamboo shoots and more:

• one chicken breast
• 1/3 of a small jar of bamboo shoots (I got them for next to nothing at one of the supermarket chains)
• 4 cm of leek (the firm, pale green part)
• a piece of red pepper
• 2 spring onions
• Sichuan pepper
• soy sauce
• salt
• olive oil
• jasmine rice (my favourite)

The recipe (ideally you’d use a wok):

I serve this with rice, but you can just eat the meat on its own. I cook the jasmine rice first, and only once it’s draining (I use boil-in-the-bag rice) do I start on the dish.

I marinated the chicken the day before (an hour or two before cooking works too). I cut it into small pieces, salted it, rubbed it with Sichuan pepper and added a splash of olive oil and some soy sauce.

I cut the vegetables into medium-sized pieces. I heat olive oil in a frying pan (fairly high “flame”, about 7 on a scale of 1 to 10) and toss in the chicken pieces. I keep stirring as they fry. After a minute I pour in about two tablespoons of olive oil (by eye, but thereabouts). I keep stirring. That’s the whole idea with Chinese stir-fries. After about 3 minutes I add the bamboo shoots.

And then what? I stir, of course 🙂 Another minute and in go the rest of the vegetables. Stir again. I add about a tablespoon of olive oil and a little Sichuan pepper. Two minutes and it’s ready. The chicken shouldn’t be terribly soft, but of course it can’t be raw in the middle. Enjoy!