Jirapa's Thai Chicken and rice

Please don't tell Jirapa, but I made this with ground pork.  Shhhhhhhh!

I was in a meeting/potluck and had a bite of this concoction and yelled "dude, who made this?  It's awesome".  Jirapa, from Thailand copped to it, and was kind enough to share the recipe.  I changed it a little bit to accommodate our tastes.


Jirapa's Thai Chicken and Rice
Cooked Jasmine rice (we usually do brown rice, but I'll admit that the Jasmine rice felt like a naughty treat)
1 package of chicken sausage (I used ground pork from our local butcher)
10 leaves of sweet basil, sliced in half
3 carrots, sliced in to matchsticks
1/2 of a small root of ginger, diced
I added 1/2 cup of organic chicken broth (Better than Bouillon from Costco) and about 3 tblsp of organic olive oil (Costco's brand).  I also added some sugar snap pea pods from the garden.

In heavy saucepan, heat the sausage until cooked thoroughly.  My tip for cooking ground sausage super quickly is to let it cook for a bit and separate it with a wooden spoon.  Once it's a little bit browned, break out a pastry cutter and mash it all up.  It will cut in to very small pieces and cook through in no time!

Remove the sausage from the pan, and cook the veggies and ginger in the grease until tender.  Turn the stove off, and add basil.  Cover and let it sit for a few minutes.  Serve over the rice.

Now, I made this on a week day, and didn't have time to cook the meat and make the dinner that night.  I cooked the sausage the night before and kept it in the fridge.  The day of, I heated up a little bit of olive oil and cooked the veggies for a bit.  I added about 1/3-1/2 cup of chicken broth to the veggies, and then added the cooked sausage in to heat up.  We prefer our rice mixtures with a little extra "sauce", so the chicken broth was just the right touch for us.

Ordinarily, I do NOT like ginger in my food, but for some reason it didn't bother me in the least in this, and actually made the whole dish.

When we lived in LA, Troy mainly did lighting on reality shows; they were our "bread and butter".  One reality cooking competition was getting rid of all their dishes after a season, and we snagged about 50 chopsticks for free.  They came in so handy for this photo, and then were promptly discarded as we ate this with forks.

We also grilled veggies that night, and after about 2 minutes of eating the grilled eggplant, onions, and zucchini separately, we just ended up dumping them in to the bowl.  That was a perfect addition to this!