Yellow rice chicken skillet

January 29, 2025 6:46 PM

If you've been following the blog from the beginning, you'll know that yellow rice chicken skillet is one of my go-to dishes to make. It's one of the first meals I ever made that made me think "wow, I can actually cook something that tastes good." I've made it so many dang times (and those are just the times I blogged about it!)

But my last few attempts at yellow rice were not great. I've made so many adjustments to it over the years, and now I'm questioning all my adjustments. First, I undercooked it, then I made it too mushy. Or I somehow overcooked and undercooked it at the same time. Other people still tell me that it tastes good, but I don't know...I feel like I need to redeem myself.

And my fridge has been looking kind of bare lately. This makes a really large portion--it's like 5 meals for me! So I decided to restock my fridge and be a little extra with the food photography today. I've also never actually made a dedicated post for this dish, so here it is.

Because I'm taking life slowly now, I make sure to prep as much as I can before I actually turn on the stove. While I'm sure I could chop up my garlic while my chicken is cooking, this is just a lot more relaxing, and if anything, I can wash dishes if I'm waiting on something to finish cooking.

This would be better with bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, but I'm trying to make something that's easy to eat, so I went with the boneless, skinless stuff. I did pre-salt the chicken the day before to see if that would allow more flavor to soak in, and maybe it helped a little bit. I think it could have used more salt though.

I cooked the chicken for about 3 minutes on each side (I intentionally did not cook it all the way through in the first step) and I must have had larger pieces of chicken because I could not fit all four pieces in the pan at once. I really wanted to get some color on the chicken, so I cooked it on medium high (I normally just do medium). By the time I was done cooking the second batch of chicken, the kitchen got reeeaaal smokey. So I had to blast the fan and open the windows 😬 But it was alright. I did get a little bit of that golden color.

So I go back and forth on the amount of chicken broth to use in this dish. The recipe calls for 2.5 cups, but sometimes that makes the dish really mushy. But I also think that's because I usually pre-wash my rice. So this time I decided to just not wash the rice (blasphemy! 😱)

And I also cooked it for exactly as long as the recipe stated, which is 25 minutes on low, and 10 minutes just sitting there on no heat. I think the rice ended up being cooked alright, maybe a tad mushy on the bottom, so it probably doesn't need to be cooking for that long.

Because I'm trying to make easy meals for the future, I did go and cut up all of the chicken into bite-sized pieces. I don't like needing to use a knife when I'm eating chicken. And I also gave everything a mix so the peas and chicken were evenly distributed throughout the rice.

Ultimately, I'm pretty happy with this! The rice texture isn't perfect, but it's all cooked, and the chicken was cooked well too. I think it would have been better if I added more salt or if I just made the chicken stock more concentrated. But those are easy tweaks.

What I'm really excited for are the pan-fried leftovers tomorrow morning.