Pumpkin pork rice

It's October and at this time of the year, in many parts of the world, it's Fall already and on my side of the world, there isn't any seasons apart from rain and sun. If you consider haze to be a 'season' then yes that is also a season. Yeah at this time of the year, we do have hazy situations here. Ok, let's not go there now.

Lately, I've been seeing so many recipes with pumpkin, literally anything savoury or sweet with pumpkin often appears in my facebook feed.

I decided to make a simple one-dish meal with pumpkin which is made with just pumpkin, chicken (or pork) and mushrooms. This is a foolproof meal if you follow the steps correctly.

This would make for 4 pax but please adjust accordingly if you prefer more rice or more protein.

Ingredients:

2 chicken thighs (I used 500g pork belly, sliced)

500g pumpkin, skinned and cut into cubes

200g mushrooms (I used bunashimeji Jap mushrooms)

300g white rice, uncooked

a handful of chopped parsley

Marinade for the chicken:

 

1 tbsp light soya sauce

1 tbsp fish sauce

1 tsp sugar I omitted this

1 tsp cornflour

 

Method:

1. You can choose to debone the chicken or use chicken parts or pork belly like I did. Marinate the marinade ingredients with the meat used for at least half hour or more.
2. Wash the rice and note that as the pumpkin and mushrooms have high water content, add lesser water to your rice than normal. This would mean adding about 2/3 water that you usually use. For me, I used about 2.5 cups of rice so I added water to about the level for 2 cups of rice. Then you can turn the electric rice cooker to allow the rice to cook.
3. After you removed the skin of the pumpkin and the seeds (you may bake this to make it a snack), cut the pumpkin into cubes.
4. Cut off the ends of the mushroom roots and wash it to clean it from any dirt that might have been left. Alternatively, you may also use shitake mushrooms if you prefer them.
5. Heat a wok over medium hot fire. Once the wok is heated, you may add about 1-2 tbsp oil and the meat.
6. Stir the chicken/pork for about 1 minute till it's fragrant and add the mushrooms. After 1-2 minutes, scoop the meat/mushroom mixture and add it to the rice in the rice cooker and allow the rice to continue to cook.
7. In the same wok, add the pumpkin and 2-3 tbsp water and stir fry the pumpkin with high heat. To this, I also added about 1 tbsp chopped garlic for more fragrance. Add this pumpkin/garlic mixture to the rice cooker and allow the rice to continue to cook.
8. When the rice is finally cooked, you can fluff the rice up with a chopstick so that the ingredients are well mixed. You may taste to see if it's salty enough. If it's not, you may wish to add some dark soya sauce to make the rice look brownish and add taste. Otherwise, you may just add sambal chilli as a condiment to the pumpkin pork rice and it would taste just as good.

This dish is definitely a good one-pot meal and fuss-free too. It would go perfect with a piping hot bowl of soup or without as well.

 

 

I'm submitting this post to Little Thumbs Up organized by Zoe of Bake for Happy Kids, Doreen of my little favourite DIY and Eileen from Eileen's Diary.