Spanish-style chicken

This recipe is from a cookbook I had checked out of the library and then suggested someone buy me for Christmas (thanks, Wendy!). It is the only cookbook I received, bizarrely for me, so at least I didn't pile on too much. But it brought me right back to where I was this time last year when I started this blog with the gimmick in mind that I would try at least one new recipe from each of my ridiculous number of cookbooks. It was a fairly ambitious goal, given that I had 226 cookbooks at that point, but not out of the realm of possibility, given that I've made more than 200 new recipes in several other years in my life.

But of course life intervened in the form of massive amounts of work and the occasional familial health disaster, and by mid-way through the year, it was clear that goal was made of unobtanium. (And my cookbook collection only grew.) So now I'm left to ponder whether to hit reset and try again, or try some other gimmick like cooking my way through specific cookbooks. Basically, the underlying goals behind the gimmick are to make better use of my existing resources and to make myself get back in the habit of trying more new things after a few years of just coping in between bouts of relentless work. 

So I haven't decided yet where I'll try to wind up or how I'll approach it, but either way, here's one new recipe in the can from a new-to-me cookbook:

Spanish-style chicken

From “One Pot” from the kitchens of Martha Stewart Living

Ingredients

1 whole chicken cut up, or about 10 pieces of any part of the chicken

Smoked Spanish paprika or pimenton

1 tablespoon or more olive oil

6 garlic cloves, minced

1 heaping tablespoon tomato paste

1/3 cup sherry vinegar

2 cups chicken broth

A jar of marinated piquillo peppers cut into strips (or if you can’t find those, use roasted red peppers and add a pinch of cayenne pepper to make up for the heat)

½ cup pitted green olives

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Method

Heat a large Dutch oven over medium high heat. Add olive oil. Sprinkle chicken with coarse salt and paprika and brown skin-side down in batches. Flip over and brown for a few minutes more.

Remove chicken from heat and reduce heat to low. Add garlic and tomato paste, scrapping up brown bits with spatula. Return chicken to pan, skin-side up. Add vinegar to deglaze pan. Add chicken broth, peppers and olives and bring to a boil. Transfer to a preheated 400-degree oven and bake, uncovered, for 25 minutes.

Depending on thickness of sauce, at this point you can remove the chicken from the pan and keep covered while you return the pot to the stove and boil down the sauce to reduce it further. Add most of the chopped parsley to the sauce, then serve chicken topped with sauce and more parsley. Couscous, polenta or quinoa would make good absorbent side dishes.

Rating: Nice; although I suspect having the smoked Spanish paprika or the piquillo peppers is crucial. You could probably get by with having a substitution on one or the other, but not both without sacrificing some of that smokiness. There's not much chopping involved, so while it takes about an hour overall, much of that time you don't have to be paying attention to the chicken. And having just one pot to clean plus a few prep implements really is a plus I hadn’t considered when first eying this cookbook, but it’s helpful. I stored the leftovers in the pot and plan to heat it up in that again, so there’s even more dishes economy going on.

Tip: For some reason I was slow to tumble to this one, but leftover bits of tomato paste freeze well. I measure out 1 tablespoon globs and freeze them flat on a sheet, then transfer them to a plastic container. That way you can just chip out the amount you need when you need it, since so few recipes actually call for an entire can of tomato paste.