As ever, use a home-made chicken stock if you have some in the freezer. (Be sparing with the stock when you come to add the chicken mixture to increase the chances of a good crust.) The chicken will be soft from the steaming, and the vegetables, with their lower water content, will cook rather more slowly than the chicken surrounding them, leaving a lovely fresh crunch to things. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a tasty crust at the bottom of the rice, created by the fat from the stock and the sesame oil which drips to the bottom “frying” the rice at the base of the dish. Texture’s a really important part of this dish. All the other ingredients should be easy for you to get your hands on. They’re great, and if you can track them down they’re well worth using, but if you can’t find them, substitute with canned shoots, rinsed well under the tap. I found a jar of bamboo shoots in sesame oil when on an emergency tonic water run to Tesco.

I’ve been really pleased to see so many oriental ingredients make their way into even some of our…slightly rubbisher supermarkets. The rice absorbs juices from the chicken along with all its seasoning, making for a really savoury dish. Be careful when blitzing – you want small pieces of chicken, which steam to a really tasty, juicy result, rather than a smooth paste, which steams to a rubbery horribleness. You’ll be using the food processor to blitz some chicken thighs into something a bit like a try rough chicken mince. It’s very, very tasty indeed, but it only uses one dish (or a rice cooker, if you happen to have one in the house) and doesn’t require any advance preparation or marinading.

This is similar to a lot of Chinese claypot dishes, and is really worth rolling out on a day when you have guests you want to spend time talking to rather than cooking for.

Golden fresh farms east palomar