What I Made for Dinner :: Roast Chicken on Wild Mushroom Sticky Rice “Risotto”

I make a lot of chicken ... maybe too much chicken for my family's liking. But it's an easy protein to work with and it's usually not too expensive. And it must be my personal childhood preference working its subliminal magic because I'm often drawn to chicken recipes when I'm browsing Pinterest.

The recipe for Roast Chicken on Wild Mushroom Sticky Rice "Risotto" jumped out at me the second I saw it: 1) it uses skin-on dark meat chicken, 2) wild mushrooms!, and 3) I love sticky rice but I've never made it. 

The recipe calls for six cups of cooked sticky rice. I wasn't sure how much uncooked rice to prepare to get six cups of cooked rice, so I just followed the directions I found in the instruction manual of my fancy-schmancy rice cooker. I used three cups of uncooked rice and I ended up with waaaaaay too much cooked rice. I didn't measure the cooked amount, but, as you can see, the rice alone filled up a 9x13 (3 quart) baking dish and half of a 7x11 (2 quart) baking dish. Next time, I only need to make half the amount of rice ... maybe even less than that!

The chicken quarters were a bit unwieldy in the dish and I only used three instead of the four the recipe calls for. I baked some leftover boneless, skinless thighs for the kids (they're not very good at taking meat off of the bone) and that worked out just fine. I'm personally a fan of skin- and bone-on chicken, but next time I'm going to break down the leg quarters so it fits in the baking dish better.

As for the mushrooms, I used Baby Bellas, enoki, and brown shimeji. As is expected, the mushrooms cook down considerably, so if you like mushrooms, cook a lot of them! My kids aren't fans of mushrooms so my husband and I got to enjoy what they didn't eat.

All in all, this is an easy recipe to follow. You just have to give yourself extra time to precook the sticky rice. I made mine in the morning and let it cool at room temperature until the evening. I would also suggest not dumping in all of the chicken stock at once. Depending on how creamy/soft you like your "risotto," you may want to adjust the amount of liquid you add, especially if you're not following the recipe exactly when it comes to how much cooked rice you'll be using. I feel like I used too much chicken stock and my rice ended up a bit too mushy.