Watch me try to recreate the taste of Japanese grilled chicken skewers at home. Spoiler alert: it did not go as planned.

Time: 3/5
6 meals in an hour is a pretty good deal.

Effort: 3/5
Basically standard operating procedure by now.

Do as I Say

Ever had late night Yakitori at a Japanese sake bar? Chicken skewers grilled over charcoal and lacquered with a sweet and salty glaze? Yeah, me neither. But the pictures make them look so enticing.

Just One Cookbook makes it look really feasible too, and I wanted to see if I could scale it up to make it into a chicken and rice meal prep. So here I am, trying to modify a recipe that I’ve never tried before, like that time when I made what I thought was Hungarian goulash and had no idea if I got it right.

I’ll spare you the trouble and tell you straight up how my experiment went – do as I say, not as I do. I thought I could be smart and throw the marinade onto the sheet pan and let it reduce into a glaze as the chicken cooks, but all that accomplished was turning this roast into a braise.

I mean, it’s still a cool outcome. Juicy braised chicken thighs with decently well-browned skin is a great dinner. But this is another one of those times where going too far down the lazy minimalist route costs me more in results than what I save in effort.

Oh well, you don’t know what you don’t find out. The next time I do this, I’m definitely going to roast the thighs dry, reduce the marinade into a glaze in a separate pan and glaze the chicken towards the end. You know, the way Just One Cookbook says I should have done it in the first place. Excellent work by Namiko, as always.

And if you’re looking to continue the Japanese theme, go check out my Chicken Teriyaki Rice Bowl meal prep for an example of using a kitchen torch to brown things properly and create some nice, smoky flavours.

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 0. We’re back in business, bay-bee~

Dramatis Personae

Served 6.

Skin on, boneless chicken thighs – 1kg

The GOAT of meal prep protein. Skin on because roasted chicken skin is delicious, and boneless because bones take up space in the oven and reduce the number of meals I can make per batch.

Marinade/glaze

For this, mix together:
6 tablespoons of light soy sauce
3 tablespoons each of mirin and Chinese rice wine (because I don’t have sake)
5 teaspoons of sugar
Plenty of freshly ground black pepper 

You will notice this is quite a lot of liquid. You will recall that moisture is the enemy of browning. You will not be surprised that my sheet pan ends up being very soupy because I poured all the marinade over the chicken.

Vegetables – 1.2kg

Split evenly between carrots and string beans, both of which are quite meal prep friendly because they’re easy to wash and cut up. I’ve started trying to include more variety in the vegetable portion of my meal preps. Let’s see how it goes.

And to make things super interesting, I’m finishing the vegetables with a stir fry sauce inspired loosely by Thai-style Drunken Noodles: 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, a teaspoon of fish sauce and a sprinkle of sugar. 

Turned out great. This is going into the books as something to encore, the next time I make a stir fry. Hopefully I manage to find where the oyster sauce has been hiding, and I’ll make a proper Pad Kee Mao sauce.

Executive summary

1. Mix the chicken with marinade ingredients and refrigerate overnight.
2. The next day, preheat oven to 200C/400F and start the rice cooker.
3. Lay chicken onto a baking sheet with aluminium foil and parchment paper. Roast in oven for 30 minutes.
4. While chicken roasts, wash and cut the vegetables, and prepare the stir fry sauce.
5. Cook vegetables in a skillet or wok, on medium-high heat. Once done to your liking, stir in the sauce until combined.
6. Assemble and serve.

Play by Play

Chicken can marinade right inside the bag it comes from, because who wants to do more dishes than the bare minimum necessary? The other nice thing about the bag is that you can get most of the air out and submerge the chicken completely.

Oven is preheating as I lay the chicken out. The decision to pour the marinade in was a split second one, and not well thought out. But oh well, c’est la vie!

Rice is cooking, chicken is roasting, now on the the vegetables. I keep coming back to this recipe template because it’s just so efficient.

Carrots and beans will wilt a bit when cooked, but not too much. I waited until they were basically done before stirring in the sauce.

What a coincidence, the chicken was done just as I put the finishing touches on the vegetables. You can see the consequence of pouring the marinade in there – instead of becoming a glaze as I hoped, it pooled in the bottom and reduced into a goop. The chicken still looks great though.

Not too shabby, if I say so myself. Itadakimasu!

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