02 February 2009

Orange-Ginger Chicken with Ginger Sugar Snap Peas


So this chicken recipe was maybe the easiest thing I've done in a while. Just three ingredients: chicken, ginger, and an orange. I found the recipe in a French cookbook a few months ago but only just found the paper I'd scrawled the recipe on. This is what I wrote:

Chicken w/ ginger and orange

2 chicken thighs (bone-in)
1 breast
1 2-in piece of gingerroot
2 blood orange
salt/pepper

Oven 350.
Rub chicken w/ peeled ginger
Peel of skin. Then
squeeze juice. Put chicken
in oven proff dish, add
rind and juice. Chop ginger
and press into chicken skin.
Cook ~ 20 min. in oven until
skin is crispy.

So okay. If you want crispy skin in 20 minutes, you'd probably have to turn the heat up higher, and also your chicken would be raw. What I did was this:

Preheat oven to 350F. Coat baking dish with cooking spray. Season 3 chicken thighs with salt and pepper and place in prepared baking dish.

Grate peel from 1 orange over chicken pieces. Cut peel off 2-in knob of ginger, then finely grate ginger over chicken pieces. (I used a microplane grater, and it was more a pulp than bits of ginger.) Cut open the peeled orange and squeeze into the baking dish around the chicken pieces. Place in the oven and bake until the skin is crispy and the chicken is cooked through, about 40 minutes.

I don't know how crispy I'd say the skin got, since I don't eat chicken skin and I'd just thrown it away. But I imagine it would have been crispier if I'd put a little oil on the chicken.

In any case, this resulted in a really moist and very subtly flavoured piece of chicken. I suspect the flavour would have been stronger if I weren't so averse to chicken skin, but it was lovely anyway.

To make the snap peas, I just sautéed them lightly in a touch of oil with a glob of grated ginger (and also some garlic), then added a bit of water and covered them with a lid so they'd steam a bit. I like them to be quite crunchy and these were perfect.

Tasty all around.

3 comments:

  1. Looks so good! ... going to link this post at my chicken tuesdays.

    Hello from SpeedyCat in Minnesota!

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  2. Heh.. cool. Your chicken Tuesdays are interesting and strange :D

    ReplyDelete