Week 42 - Low and Slow

A theme of "low and slow" is not the easiest thing to do when we're trying to make faster dinners for earlier bedtimes. We could have gone with the slow cooker, but I didn't want to figure out how to do that in the Instant Pot, so just decided to make a recipe for Moroccan-style chicken with lentils that I found on BBC Good Food. Cooking for 1.5 hours at a low temperature seemed low and slow enough for me.

Before going into the oven

The recipe was fairly easy. Just make a spice rub out of crushed garlic, ground cumin, ground coriander, and paprika, and then rub some chicken thighs with olive oil and then the spice rub. Brown the chicken, set it aside, then fry a sliced-up onion. Add red lentils, chopped tomatoes, ketchup, chicken stock, a cinnamon stick, and a bunch of whole dried apricots. Cover and stick the casserole dish in a 350 degree oven for 90 minutes. That was it. Sounded so straightforward and easy. Just long.

Unintentional soup after 90 minutes in the oven

We did have one complication though. I tripled the amount of lentils, so figured that I would need triple the amount of chicken stock. But the amount of chicken stock in the original recipe was so far off that we ended up with soup. The broth tasted great, and it wasn't bad having extra to spoon on top of our couscous, but we could have gone with at least two cups less liquid and been just fine.

The chicken was so tender and completely fell apart (in a good way), and the entire dish tasted delicious and nourishing. We really did enjoy eating it, but I didn't add it to our cookbook because putting aside 1.5 hours just for the oven time isn't the easiest thing to do right now. We took a break for the summer, but we've done a fair amount of North African food this year because we're up to Algeria in the AtWCC, so it was nice to get back to the region as the weather is getting cooler. We're definitely glad we tried the recipe, even if we don't know when we'd make it again.