Roast Chicken Marinated In Wine Lees

I ferment my own red glutinous rice wine 红曲酒 using My Hokkien grandmother's method which yields both wine and wine lees 红糟. While the family use the lovely mellow wine for drinking and cooking, we do not quite know what to do with all that wine lees.  The most common way to use the wine lees is to stew it with chicken but I am not fond of the dish finding the taste boring. The wine lees tint the chicken a blood red colour and some people, like the Brother and the Father are put off by it.

It is thus a delight to find the roast chicken marinated with wine lees recipe in Sylvia Tan's "mad about food" cook book. With the addition of shallots and garlic, the flavour is much more robust and complex. The wine lees and honey marinate gives the chicken a beautiful reddish brown hue.  A winner in both taste and aesthetics!