Mes Gentilhommes, today on 5 Germinal, we celebrate the hen. I decided to stretch and attempt one of the more seemingly challenging recipes from the Fat Rice cookbook, Po Kok Gai, a Macanese chicken curry.  Po Kok Gai was a beast of a dish and we ate it for days (happily). The dish includes: tumeric chicken (galinha bafassa), coconut curry, cooked vegetables (onions, green cabbage, carrots), pickled lemon, chicken fat croutons, cheese, chorizo, black olives and tea eggs. The tumeric chicken was but one small component of a dish that took me several days, and trips to the grocery store, to wrangle. I’m going to post just about the chicken element which was delicious in its own right. My apologies to Fat Rice for not using the exact ingredients recommended in the recipe – I’ve used regular grocery store rice wine, curry powder and vinegar rather than Shaoxing rice wine, sweet curry and Filipino cane vinegar. I vow to acquire these on my next trip to Seafood City.

Galinha Bafassa / Tumeric Chicken 

1 inch piece of ginger, thinly sliced

4 green onions, sliced

3/4 cup of rice wine

2 tsp of curry powder

1 tbs ground tumeric

1 tbs rice wine vinegar

1 1/2 tsp salt

3 lbs bone in, skin-on chicken thighs

Add together all the ingredients, except chicken, in a gallon-sized zip lock bag. Mix together a bit. Add the chicken and squish it around to make sure it’s covered with the marinade. Refrigerate overnight.

Set the oven to 350. Remove the chicken from the marinade and shake off any liquid remaining. Place skin side up in a baking dish just big enough to hold all the pieces. Add enough water to the dish so that the water comes up a third of the way of the chicken pieces. Bake, uncovered, for about 45 minutes. Remove the chicken and refrigerate the liquid, reserving the chicken fat for chicken fat croutons. Serve with coconut rice and enjoy!