Growing up in a really Taiwanese family, we ate a lot of black sesame oil dishes. Mom would saute ginger in sesame oil to infuse it before cooking all sorts of goodies with it… such as chicken, pork, gizzards, liver… just kidding about the liver part. I do however love a good plate full of chicken gizzards fried in sesame oil and ginger.
The weather was cold earlier in the week and I was still under the weather and craving a bowl of hot chicken cooked in sesame oil over somen noodles. I stopped by the local market and picked up two thighs and go to work. Mom’s version was to dice up the chicken and cook the heck out of it. I decided to do it with a twist; pan searing the chicken on my All-Clad so that I’d crisp up the chicken skin before deglazing the pan and making the soup base for the dish. I’m sure my great-grandmother is turning over in her grave right now since when she was making this dish 100 years ago there wasn’t any All-Clad; nor did convection ovens exist. Sorry Great Granny… I updated your dish…
I deboned the chicken thighs and pounded them thin. Since we don’t have a meat tenderizer, I used the back of Sam’s precious special ice cream scoop (who knew that ice cream scoops were good for so many uses!), heated up the sesame oil in my trusty pan and fried my ginger slices until they were crisp. Tossed in the chicken skin side down and let it sizzle and flipped it. I pulled the chicken off and then deglazed the pan with some rice wine and added in the chicken stock and let the whole thing simmer. Simple easy dish… When I sent a picture of the finished product to Mom, she squawked and told me how “un-Traditional” it was… and how I made a simple dish into a complicated thing… oh yeah and I didn’t take the chicken skin off – which was probably going to increase my pant size by 2. Thanks Mom. In the meantime, I’m going to try to figure out how to make this dish in the future with butter. 😀
