This delightful winter-time dinner comes to us from In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite by Melissa Clark. You can easily forgo the gin and vermouth if you don’t want want to dig into your Better Half’s stash, but then the chicken thighs will be sober as a judge. Which is a really outdated saying because it seems that not a day goes by when we don’t hear about a judge being pulled over for a DUI, at least in the Empire State.
1 large apple (or 2 small)
1 lb boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-inch strips
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon white vermouth
1 1⁄2 teaspoons gin
2 tablespoons dill or 2 tablespoons parsley
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon whole coriander seed
1⁄2 teaspoon kosher salt
1⁄2 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
crusty bread, for serving (or rice)
Preheat the oven to 400°.
Core the apple and slice as thinly as you can, between 1/8 and 1/4 inch.
In a 13 x 9 inch pan, toss all the ingredients except 1 tablespoon cilantro (or dill or parsley).
Spread the ingredients out into one layer in the pan.
Roast until the chicken is cooked through and the apples are softened, about 20 minutes.
Garnish with the remaining cilantro.
The sauce will be thin, so serve with crusty bread for sopping up the sauce or over rice.
It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken . . .
Aw man, Meme-Mom used to make a beer chicken when I was a meme-ager that was very similar to this. The alcohol really tenderizes the meat, and it’s also very juicy.
Frank Perdue can suck it, though.
When I was looking for an image I, too, remember thinking that I really dislike Frank Perdue but I couldn’t remember why. Was he a big Reagan supporter? Or conditions at his processing plants are especially brutal for the immigrants who work there? But I thought that was Tyson?
Labor issues: per his Wikipedia entry — “In the 1980s, Perdue twice sought assistance from then-Mafia boss Paul Castellano to fend off a union’s effort to represent workers at his company, according to a federal commission on labor corruption.”
And — along with many others like Tyson — a proliferator of CAFOs, which are the absolute worst of industrial agriculture.
Parsley or dill! Hahahaah can you imagine how horrible that swap would be if someone hated dill.
I seem to have screwed up the ingredients list slightly. It should have been 2 tbsp cilantro (or dill or parsley) with cilantro being the preferred option, but Melissa knows there are people like me who have that “cilantro tastes like dish soap” gene. Or it could be the original recipe did this. In any event I use dill, because we have a ton of it up on the Rooftop Herb Garden.