quick meals for quick ladies: soboro chicken
This is an expansion/update on my meal registry.
Girl, I’m broke. Whether I should be eating the following is immaterial; it’s what I am eating. I am a creature of convenience, and also, shy. Get in, get out.
Ten years ago, my spouse started using this simple Bon Appetit recipe for Soboro Beef. I love this recipe because it teaches an important culinary maxim that will carry you far in life: anything simmered in a 2:2:1 ratio of sake, mirin, and soy sauce, will have you believing you just ate at the local hibachi.
Recently a Costco-sized pack of Amylu chicken crumbles appeared in the fridge unannounced. I was eventually told these chicken crumbles were explicitly for me. Bet. Already armed with an arsenal of condiments, plus a bulk supply of microwaveable jasmine rice, I knew just what to do.
I grabbed my Anyday bowl, designed for microwave cooking. This was a pandemic-era impulse purchase from a company shilled by celebrity chef David Chang, a home cook as lazy as I am, albeit for totally different reasons. (Once he gets home from work, he uses the microwave. I bought his book about this, as I was coincidentally already obsessed with midcentury microwave cooking.)
I’m not going to divulge what transpired with the Amylu crumbles the first time around, except that I’ve got to stop carelessly skimming when I read. Look, it all started when I was a kid. I didn’t want to experience any unexpected feelings, so I’d skim first, confirm no emotional jumpscares, then pore over the written word afterward. At some point I became too tired to pore. Now I cannot read a Costco package properly.
3-Minute Microwave Soboro Chicken
- Crumble raw chicken crumbles into a glass bowl, plus mirin and Bachan’s Original. Fish sauce was a mistake here, a mistake I did not make the second, third, or fourth times I tried this.
- Microwave one serving of Amylu chicken crumbles for I think 45 seconds, but you might want to double-check that. Maybe two servings, maybe longer?
- Add a squiggle of Kewpie mayo to the bowl. Not sure this actually did anything; I was just trying to add a little extra textural egg ‘slip’, but I guess mirin is already pretty slippery. Honestly, skip this step entirely. Combine ingredients.
- Technically this recipe calls for green onions. I buy them already chopped and freeze-dried, since I will never use a grocery-store amount of onion in time. Freeze-dried onions (spring onions, green onions, scallions) are very papery and delicate, so you’ll just stir them directly into whatever you have so far—like, reviving these onions is not some great, laborious task.
- Microwave your bag of minute rice. Mine takes 90 seconds. It’s very fluffy and hot.
- It’s ready to serve! Ideally you serve one thing over the top of the other, but I’m eating straight out of the microwaveable bowl, so I’m fully incorporating the rice (although today it was noodles) with the chicken sludge.
Enjoy!
I’ve already mentioned soy sauce, mirin, sake, fish sauce (it’s Red Boat), Bachan’s, Kewpie, and dried greens. Here are other staples floating around the pantry:
- McCormick Umami Seasoning, which is easier to locate than readymade mushroom powder (otherwise, make-at-home)
- a world tour of instant noodles
- Ramen Bae’s original dry topping mix, with ingredients sized to fully reconstitute in hot water within like 4 minutes
- and dried fluffy egg
- and dried wood ear mushroom slivers
With a little ingenuity, you can stretch your dry and wet goods indefinitely. Yum!
