I decided we are having chicken this week but I have no idea what to cook with it. There is no point in asking the hubby as he will always say “curry!” I wanted to do something different and finally decided late last night I am going to cook it stuffed with glutinous rice.

Roast chicken with glutinous rice – I have not made this dish for a long time. This recipe is also not in this new blog. So I decided to cook, photograph and blog it, least I forget in my dotage.

As soon as I have made up my mind on what to cook, I washed and marinated my chicken overnight, soaked my glutinous rice and the mushrooms. This morning all I had to to was removed everything from the fridge and let all rest to room temperature before I started soaking the dried shrimps, peeling and slicing. Then it was a matter of just firing up the pan frying and stuffing.

When ready it was then placed in my convectional oven for 90 minutes because it is a very ‘Large’ M&S chicken. I preferred to use my single convectional oven over my big fan oven for this because it has a turn table and the chicken will come out evenly browned.

As usual my recipe is a guide. You do not have to add dried shrimps if you don’t want to, or you can use dark soy sauce, which I did not use in this case. You can use dried scallops or oysters even. It is entirely up to you. Today I also added chestnuts to mine as my hubby loves them. You know, sometimes less is really more. However I have used a bit more ginger because I really like the taste and ginger with sesame oil is a match made in heaven, according to my taste buds anyway. Here’s a few TIPs

TIP – When frying your rice, use the soaked mushroom water and make sure the rice is al dente and not too cooked for we do not want mushy rice. Hmmm….. well maybe one day, if I could be so lucky and live old enough to have that ‘toothless’ grin.

TIP – I did not wrap my chicken before baking because I actually like some of my rice ‘crunchy’ If you don’t then by all means wrap your chicken entirely after stuffing and bake for the first hour, then remove the covering and bake the last 30 minutes uncovered for browning the chicken. You may also like to brush your chicken with some honey at this stage (all optional) I brushed mine with a mix of sesame oil and more sherry.