Weezel's Recipes - PotRoast Chicken

Just Plain Daily Cooking: Chicken in the Pot Recipe

It was a good weekend to roast chicken and root veggies. I had red potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and baby cooking bananas in mine.

This is completely "create as you go" cooking. If you don't have everything I had on hand but you have some other root veggies, go for it! I made rice to go with it.

Ingredients

Chicken -- I had a package with a whole breast, a leg, and a wing... from a chicken half the size of a turkey from my brother's organic farm. A cut up oven stuffer roaster would be about the same amount. Cut into serving-size pieces.
4-5 smallish (clemantine sized) red potatoes, sliced in wedges - half then eighths, long way.
2 decent sized sweet potatoes, sliced to similar size.
2 smallish onions, ditto
A whole slew of baby cooking bananas... about 20 in a bunch. Or you could use 2 medium size plantains, cut into 3 inch long lengths, then each chunk cut into 4 slices lengthwise.
Balsamic vinegar, oh, about half a cup
Lots of pepper, some salt, lots of dried onion powder, some good fresh cinnamon, and a little cardamom, about 1/3 cup brown sugar, and a teaspoon of ginger paste (or similar fresh ginger minced).

Just drop the chicken and all veggies except the bananas in a giant ovenproof casserole with a lid, season simply with salt, pepper, onion powder, balsamic vinegar. Cover, and cook at 350 for an hour and a half. Baste about every half hour with the juice. A lot will form from the veggies.

Put the baby bananas on top (out of their skins. They're about the size of breakfast sausages! You could use sliced plantain bananas too but they're not nearly so cute) and dust the top with lots of cinnamon and a little cardamom.

Cook another hour or so. Add brown sugar to the juice an hour later, to taste, and a little ginger paste and a lot more black pepper. Enough to give a bit of heat. That is, "season to taste". You could go Indian Curry Powder too. Or Thai.

This was incredible! Served it with good Indian rice and several different Indian condiments. It helped to start with my brother's farm's organic chicken, which is very different tasting than the usual store kind. The cooking method was kind of a combo of roasting and poaching ... anyhow, the white meat of the chicken came out deliciously tender and juicy.

(My old house really looked like that in the winter!)

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Last Modified: 24 September 2011