No chickening out

Turmeric lime chicken (TLC)

NO chicken for four whole weeks! Fear of bird flu has made many people, including me, wary of eating chicken. The national campaign to promote chicken meals, boosted by Cabinet ministers, has resulted in public confidence in chicken consumption creeping back.  

Recently, my friends and I took the plunge and sunk our teeth into chicken again at a local restaurant. Needless to say, our animated conversation was on our favourite chicken dish.

There were varied views on the best chicken dish: roasted, curry, steamed, herbal, soya sauce, barbecued, braised, fried and red-wine chicken. My favourite is turmeric lime chicken. Just thinking of it activates my digestive juices!

 Turmeric lime chicken (TLC) is a curry dish. However, it is not bright red but a mere mellow yellow in colour due to the turmeric (yellow ginger) in it. It has a combination of three flavours – spicy, sweet and sour. This dish is my mother’s specialty – a home-cooked healthy dish that I’ve not eaten in any restaurant. 

Turmeric lime chicken is cooked using natural ingredients. The distinctive ingredient used is turmeric or  yellow ginger (wong keong) in Chinese, and kunyit in Malay. Turmeric gives curry its yellow colour.

Cucurmin is the main active ingredient in the rhizomes. The young leaves and flowers can be eaten raw as ulam. The rhizomes are used in cooking.

Turmeric rhizomes

The tropical plant is easily grown in home gardens, either in a pot (or polystyrene box) or on the ground. It requires full sunlight and is propagated from rhizomes (about 4 to 5 cm long with one or two buds). The sprouted rhizomes are planted 5 to 8 cm deep in well-drained friable sandy clay soil with added compost. Fertilisers of NPK 15:15:15 which has soluble phosphate can be applied at 2 and 5 months after planting. Turmeric rhizomes can be harvested 7 to 9 months after planting.

A turmeric plant grown in a pot

Turmeric plants planted in the ground

Turmeric plant with rhizomes and roots

Turmeric has many documented health properties. Turmeric has strong anti-oxidant properties and has a powerful anti-inflammatory effect on arthritis. It improves brain function, lowers the risk of heart diseases and helps to prevent cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

Coming back to my mum's preparation of TLC: besides turmeric, the other ingredients are chilli, shallots, lemongrass (serai), lime juice and coconut milk. For convenience, sometimes turmeric powder is used, but my mum always uses the fresh rhizome for better flavour.

Turmeric powder

The cooking method is simple. The ground ingredients are cooked in a little oil and the chicken is simmered for a short while before coconut milk and lime juice are added. It is a cooling spicy dish, according to my mother. How?  

 

"Chilli, lemongrass and shallots have a warming nature," she said.  “Chilli stimulates the appetite and aids in digestion. It warms the internal organs and is a good tonic for the blood. Lemongrass aids digestion and reduces the smell of meat. Onion relieves nasal congestion and the common cold”.  

“Turmeric and lime have a cooling nature. Turmeric reduces heat in spices. It strengthens digestion. Used in traditional medicine, it is well known for its antibiotic properties. Lime contains vitamin C and is a remedy for scurvy and other illnesses. It is good for the skin too,” she elaborated.

Why do I like TLC? Let me elaborate a little on the history of this dish. During my younger days, whenever I had spicy food like curry chicken, I would get mouth ulcers the very next day. My mother, who believes that food is classified according to properties of cooling, heaty or neutral, ensured that her children’s diet was balanced according to this principle. Every time we ate heaty food, we had to drink cooling drinks (some of which were bitter) to neutralise the heaty effect!

Mothers of that generation knew very well that “prevention is better than cure”. I grew up on this regular ritual of consuming neutralising heaty food with cooling drinks.

Coming back to TLC, one fine day my mother befriended a Penangite who taught her to cook a dish, called “lime chicken.” “This is the ideal dish for my children,” mother used to say. “it is a balanced cooling heaty dish”. It was the answer to young children who craved spicy food without the heaty after-effects. Remarkably, after eating this dish, we did not get sore throats or mouth ulcers – hence no bitter cooling herbal drinks! Because turmeric is used, I called mum’s dish “turmeric lime chicken” (TLC). This was because I like the acronym. It reminded me of a friend who told me to treat my plants with TLC to make them grow well. He meant ‘tender loving care’! Hence my mum’s dish is called TLC, a dish cooked with tender loving care.  

I remember helping out in the kitchen whenever mum cooked TLC. I pounded the chilli, shallots and turmeric using a mortar and pestle. I remember making a circular cardboard with a hole in the centre to fit nicely onto the pestle – like a Mexican hat. This prevented the pounded ingredients from splashing out, thereby reducing smarting to my eyes.

And I remember getting the coconut milk the hard way. First, my mum used the blunt end of a chopper to break the coconut into two. The water inside was not discarded. She collected it in a mug and divided it into portions for her eager children. I enjoyed drinking the sweet thirst-quenching nutritious water. Mum considered the water “cooling” too and sometimes asked us to splash it on our pimply faces. 

Then I had to straddle a coconut scraper for the coconut meat extraction. The scraper was made up of a metal serrated circular blade mounted onto a low rectangular stool. I would sit on it much like sitting on a rocking horse with the serrated blade as the “horse’s head”. With my two hands holding the half coconut and the meat pressed onto the blade, I scraped out the meat, little by little, into a pile of tiny white strands. I collected the scraped coconut, placed it in a cloth bag and then squeezed out the milk. Nowadays, the shopkeeper uses an electric scraper for this laborious task. And modern cooks use instant coconut milk powder or canned coconut milk.

            

TLC now finds favour with my mother’s grandchildren. During a family gathering recently, my little nephews finished their TLC with gusto, sans coaxing or cajoling. It is a cool dish for all generations.

                      My nephews enjoying some TLC, a chicken dish that's truly finger-lickin' good.

Perhaps it is time for you to have some TLC.

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This article was published in the Star (Malaysian newspaper) on 1st March 2004.
It is edited and more photos are added here.
This article and the recipe for TLC is published
in my cookbook, "Quick and Healthy Meals".
For more information on the book,
please write to:quickandhealthy@yahoo.com