.: evil jungle prince :.

As I haven't had a chance to buy groceries after my long trip, the kitchen is fairly empty and I've been hard pressed to come up with full meals. This is particularly true for any recipe that requires fresh vegetables. I did manage to find a frozen chicken though, so last night I decided on preparing samgyetang (삼계탕), or Korean chicken ginseng soup.

Actually I have been wanting to try making this soup for a long time, but all of the ingredients are impossible to find locally. Fortunately, thanks to a great tip by a fellow food blogger, I wound up my trip to the Bay Area last week by visiting Kukeje in Daly City -- a Korean supermarket in the truest sense of the word. It's huge! Of course I was in complete nirvana and I must have spent more than two hours there examining all the foods, ingredients, banchans, and cooking wares. I'm surprised they didn't call security on me.

I looked at a number of samgyetang recipes before deciding on the following. They were all fairly similar but with some variations, mainly having to do with the amount of garlic used and how long to simmer the chicken.

1. First I washed 1/3 cup of glutinous rice and allowed it to soak in water for 1/2 hour. I also rinsed the following stuffing ingredients: 5 jujubes (dried Chinese dates), 4 dried chestnuts, and two fingers of dried ginseng.

2. Next I cleaned the chicken and placed the rice, jujubes, chestnuts, ginseng, and six cloves of whole garlic inside the cavity. I then sewed the cavity shut and tied the legs together tightly so that the contents would remain inside during the simmering process.

3. In a large pot, I boiled water and then placed the chicken in the pot. When the water began to boil again, I turned it down to a slow simmer and simmered the bird for three hours. (This is where recipes really vary, so you may want to check around and see what others say in terms of how long to simmer the bird.) Remove anything floating on the surface during this step so that the broth remains clear.

4. Finally I removed some of the broth into a separate bowl, adding salt and pepper to taste, and then added some of the stuffing ingredients for presentation purposes. The rice stuffing was served in a separate bowl.

This was an interesting dish to experiment with. Some problems I encountered were: burning myself when I placed the chicken into the boiling water, filling the pot too full and having water spill out when I placed the chicken into the pot, and underestimating the size of the chicken in relation to the size of my pot. (I 'solved' the latter problem by flipping the bird mid way through the simmering process, but what I really need is a bigger pot.)

You can learn more about the lore of samgyetang, a revered dish in Korea, by visiting here. If you don't have a local Korean market handy, I've spotted all of these ingredients at Chinese markets as well although their jujubes have never looked quite as nice as the Korean packaged type. Got samgyetang tips for me or stories? Please share them!