Three cups chicken (三杯鸡)

I first tasted this dish in Taiwan many years back when I was working there. Love it very much. The sesame and wine and soy sauce made up the three cups. Actually, you don't use exactly 1 cup of each of these ingredients. But for this dish, you need to use basil. Without basil you can't call this three cups chicken I think. The basil makes this dish taste even better. Have been cooking this a few times already because my boys love it and this is really very simple to cook. Also since I have a pot of basil growing at home, I can always just pluck some fresh basil from the pot whenever I cook this dish.



Ingredients:
1 whole chicken cut into bitesize pieces
10 slices of ginger
15 cloves of garlic
2 red chilli (cut into big pieces)
2 stalk spring onions (cut into 2 inch pieces)

Seasonings:
60 ml of sesame oil
60 ml of light soy sauce
1/4 cup of Chinese cooking wine
2 to 3 tablespoon of sugar depending on your preference of sweetness
3 to 4 stick of cinnamons
some pepper
some chilli powder or paprika
1/4 tsp of five spice powder
1 tbsp of tomato ketchup
1 tbsp of black vinegar
a little dark soy sauce

Methods:
1. Clean chicken well and cut up into bitesize pieces.
2. In a pot (I used claypot) put the ginger, spring onions, chilli at the bottom.
3. Put the chicken piece on top. Pour all the seasonings ingredients into the pot.
4. Use big fire to cook the chicken uncovered for about 15 mins.
5. Add in bunch of basil, cover the pot and continue to cook until the sauce thickens. Turn off fire.
6. Sprinkle some more wines into the pot and stir well before serving.

(Note: It depends how much sauce you want so watch out for the sauce thickening part. Turn off fire when you have reached the right thickness you want.)

PS: I have just added chilli powder or if you don't want it too spicy, you can use
paprika. Also amended my recipe to include some dark soy sauce to have it a little darker in colour but this is personal preference.