Chili Garlic "Broken Fridge" Chicken
How to cook without a fridge
Sawaddee Ka 🙏🏼!
Before we get to today’s recipe, I have a FREE live cooking class coming up! Chef Hong Thaimee and I are hosting a joint cooking class to celebrate the wrap of Season 1 of our podcast, Sabai Talk. It’ll be on Saturday Dec 7th, 2PM EST. Register here!
My fridge broke down a few weeks ago, and while you’d think that nothing good could possibly come out of that, one thing did. A new recipe that is so good and easy it will definitely become part of my regular rotation!
Without a fridge, I was left to cook from my backup freezer on the balcony (thank god for that) and my pantry. After staring at all the things available to me for a few minutes, I thought I could make my chili garlic noodles recipe. But I still needed a protein, and that’s when I decided to make the chili garlic noodles, but with chicken instead!
The result quite honestly stunned me. Just garlic, dried chilies, and the basic seasonings of a Thai kitchen…and it was just SO incredibly good with rice. I had a few sprigs of Thai basil rooting in water on the counter, so I was able to pull a few leaves off and topped the dish, but any other green herbs will work.
Side note: While I normally keep my salty seasonings - fish sauce, oyster sauce and soy sauces - in the fridge in order to preserve their flavours, they do not “spoil” at room temp, with the exception of oyster sauce which can get mold on it after a while (a few weeks at least, depending on the temperature). Thai people store all our sauces, including oyster sauce, at room temp but we go through them much more quickly.
Note on spiciness:
I call for quite a bit of mild-to-medium chili flakes because I wanted a lot of chili flavour and colour, but if your chili flakes are quite hot, it may be too spicy for you.
Western “red pepper flakes” are generally quite mild and is a good option for this dish, though brands vary in spiciness and a Patreon member who got early access to this recipe reported that even that was too hot for her.
So, if your heat tolerance isn’t high, start with 2 teaspoons of red pepper flakes. Alternatively, use whole chilies that are mild, such as guajillo or puya, remove the seeds and grind it up.
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Nice!!:)))