A thighn of progreth
Sorry, I only have the time to spend like ten seconds thinking of a title.
This chicken drumstick-to-thigh pivot has been a wonderful thing, and I'm so glad for the feedback that I got encouraging me to do it. Thighs are so much better. They sear so much better. They cook through so much better. They cut up so much better.
I didn't have any pre-cooked rice today, so I returned to a concept I had tried once before of cooking the rice and the chicken at the same time in the same pan. That time, it hadn't all turned out quite as flavorful as I was hoping for, but I have been encouraged by the success of my new thigh-driven chicken cooking, so I thought, without or without evidence, that this time would be different.
And it was.
I started off the same way, seasoning the thighs and then putting them skin-down in hot butter over low-ish heat. I let them cook for a loong time, the flipped them once I could smell a little burny smell. Then I poured in the rinsed rice, and chicken stock (2x the volume of the rice) and a little apple cider vinegar, let it boil, and closed the lid.
I don't know why but it seemed like it took longer than normal for the rice to absorb the liquid. Eventually it mostly did and I switched the heat off like normal and let it sit while I browned butter with sage in the other pan.
I tonged the chicken onto the plate, then as I was sampling the rice (cooked very satisfactorily) I noticed a lot of the delicious oily sauce was still at the bottom of the pan. With that in mind, instead of putting the chicken on top of the rice as usual, I poured all the rice over the chicken so that the sauce would drip down onto the chicken, where I wanted it, as well as saturate the rice. It all went pretty much according to plan.
So, I'm going to say it's the best chickeny thing I've every cooked, though there's an asterisk there. When I have made a proper pan sauce, that intense salty, savory flavor is utterly delicious and unreplaceable, BUT so far I have never matched a great sauce with an outstandingly cooked chicken. In this case though, though it was slightly less intensely flavorful than a dish with a real pan sauce (the chicken---the rice was the most flavorful rice ever), the whole ensemble came across as appetizing and well-prepared, at least by the standards of food I make. I hope I can continue the upward trajectory!
What would you have titled this instead?
