How to Make Chicken and Rice Recipes Something Spectacular Wine News

The staple food I grew up on was not rice, but potatoes. There was a big pot of basmati, but it was used as a percussion instrument when my siblings and I gave concerts (it accompanied our performance of little donkey Every Christmas).

We didn’t eat rice until my mother got into what was then considered glamorous foreign food – Madhur Jaffrey’s goulash and chilli and Mughlai chicken – and we cooked it badly.

I don’t know where this approach came from, but we drained the cooked rice in a sieve, then ran cold water through it, then boiled water. This was done very carefully, so we ended up with a bowl of rice that had small separate grains in it. But we were better for potatoes.

Now there are eight bags of different types of rice in my cupboard: jasmine rice, basmati, several types of risotto rice (carnaroli, vialone nano, and arborio all produce different results) and a few types of paella rice.

The rice used for paella, and other Spanish rice dishes, is amazing. It should not be stirred. You just let it drink through the broth and other flavors surrounding it, until you have puffy grains of umami.

There are 40,000 varieties of rice, classified in different ways: by flavor, place of cultivation – under water or on a hillside for example – texture (sticky or not), grain size and shape.

“Chicken and rice”, like “tea and toast”, rolls off the tongue, as if the two were meant to be together. All over the world they are united – it’s an elemental combination.

Neither the chicken nor the rice are heavily flavored, so the cook can take those basics and dress them up. If you type “chicken and rice” on Google, your head will spin.

You could make a different dish every day of the year: Turkish chicken and rice pilaf with dill, chicken and sausage jambalaya, chicken biryani, arroz con pollo (I must have cooked it a thousand times).