Pan Roasted Chicken and Asian Dirty Rice

I was looking for a different way to make roast chicken and use up some scallions that were still in the refrigerator. During my search I came across this website http://sundaynitedinner.com/vietnamese-roasted-chicken-ga-ro-ti/. I made the chicken and the rice. I did however add a little something extra, I used lemongrass, I just had a taste for it and it goes well with this chicken. My husband, who is Vietnamese/Chinese, enjoyed both dishes and our 2 and 3 year olds gobbled it up.

The way that the other guy made his chicken he used only dark meat, which is great, but I had a whole chicken pulled out for dinner. This is not a problem though! Cut your chicken into pieces and prepare it the way he did by first browning up the chicken on the stove top and then finishing it in the oven. Just remember the chicken paradox: The white meat will cook faster than the dark meat, because their is less fat in the white meat. So you just pull the white meat out before the dark and that will prevent over cooking of the white meat. Over all cooking time between the stove top and the oven is about an hour.

I also used different measurements for the marinade (because I was going by memory)

I did this:

2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
4 large garlic cloves finely chopped
2 2 inch long pieces of lemongrass finely chopped

He also says to marinate this 12-24 hours, which if I had the time I would have totally done this but I didn't and so it marinated for 30 minutes in a fancy marinating thing called, the Vacu Vin Marinating Container, from my brother-in-law (Thank you brother-in-law!) Next time I make this I will definitely make it a day in advance though, the flavors are so good!

Next the rice. The rice is really good, we only had enough left over for my husband's lunch the next day :) This I also didn't do the same way as the other guy. I didn't have very glutinous rice, I didn't have chicken stock, and I didn't season it with salt or pepper. I had Jasmine rice that I cooked earlier in the day and let cool, and I had a whole lot of scallions.

This is how I prepared it:

I used the same pan that the chicken was cooked in. I removed a lot of the burnt stuff and drained most of the oil out leaving about 2-3 tablespoons left to saute the scallions and rice with. I sauteed the scallions first in the same manner as the other guy and I found that the moisture from the scallions helped with deglazing the pan. I scraped up all the good bits that were stuck to the bottom of the pan and then added my rice. Basically I made sure the rice and scallions were mixed together well and that the rice had been heated up again. I didn't make 6 cups of cooked rice either, I only did about 4. I couldn't fit 6 cups into the pan. But I did use the same amount of scallions.

Overall these were very good dishes and I am definitely going to make this again!