Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Day 22: Filipino-Style Chicken Adobo (Chicken in Tart Garlic Sauce)

I have to stop and plug my very neat new kitchen item, a
French Butter Bulb made by my friend Barbara Dunshee. This keeps your butter nice and fresh right on your counter and looks cool to boot!Back to the cookbook! I have turned to this recipe thinking, this looks easy to make!--and then remember it needs to be marinated over night and then I push the recipe aside and look for something else. Well, this time I actually managed to do some planning in advance and made it happen.

Filipino-style Chicken Adobo (Chicken in Tart Garlic Sauce)

I love recipes that call for chicken thighs because they are quick to cook, delicious, and a cheaper cut of chicken when it comes to shopping organic.

This recipe is very simple but requires a few dishes. The day before you want to make this, marinate 8 chicken thighs in a metallic or glass bowl along with 1/4 cup soy sauce, 10 chopped garlic cloves, black pepper, 1 and 1/4 cups cider vinegar, 2 broken up bay leaves, and 1 cup whole canned tomatoes and their juices, breaking up the tomatoes with your hands as you put them in the bowl. Cover that and stick it in the fridge for 18 plus hours.

The next day, turn out your chicken mix into a big pot and bring to a gentle bubble. Cook for 25 minutes or so, until your chicken is 175 degrees. Then remove the chicken so that you can brown it. Keep cooking the sauce to reduce it. The cookbook says to skim the fat, but there was no fat for me to skim. You are going to cook the sauce down by half.

In a big skillet brown your chicken in your preferred oil. Once chicken is brown, turn over, add 2 thin-slice onions and cook the chicken and onions, stirring occasionally so that the chicken doesn't stick.

I served this by also cooking the Working Mother's Barley, which is my favorite.

Scoop some barley into a plate, add a couple pieces of chicken plus lots of onions and top with a generous ladle of the sauce. Delicious! They aren't kidding that this is tart. Very flavorful and tastes like you spent a lot more time making it than you did. The vinegar is seriously mellowed out by the end of cooking. It was even better the next day. The sauce really penetrated into the chicken.

42 recipes down in How to Eat Supper.

1 comment:

Andrea said...

I made this and it turned out really greasy! Like you, I had no fat to skim. Was yours greasy?