Recipe - Chicken breasts with onions, carrots and jalapenos

Regular readers of this blog have probably already figured out that I cook an awful lot of chicken breasts. I really like their versatility and how easy they are to cook. There are almost no end to the different dishes you can get out of them.

I'm afraid that I far too often that the easy route and use skin and boneless chicken breasts when I cook. This recipe however uses part boned chicken breasts with the skin still on. I must be honest and admit they normally taste more and keep juicier than their stripped cousins.

One of the things to think of when cooking this dish is to use a pan that is big enough to fit the chicken breasts and at the same time deep enough so that the lid can go on. I use my 280mm cast iron casserole pot for this. It is about 75mm deep so the lid goes on nicely.

There is something that feels right about cooking this with a cast iron pot but you can of course use a normal frying pan with a lid as long as it is big enough.

Ok, enough talk about chicken breasts and cast iron casseroles - let's head over to the recipe.

Ingredients (serves 4)
4 chicken breasts, skin on and bone in
1 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp ground allspice
2 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp ground cumin
Salt
Vegetable oil
2 onions, cut into slices
2 carrots, peeled and cut into slices
4 tbsp pickled sliced jalapenos (more or less to taste)
8 garlic cloves (more or less to taste), halved if you feel like it
60 ml cider vinegar
60 ml white wine
250 ml chicken stock

Method
Combine the spices into a dryrub. Rub half of the dryrub into the chicken breasts.

Heat the oil in a frying pan on a medium heat. Once heated, add in the chicken breasts skin side down and cook until nicely browned on both sides. This should take about 3 - 5 minutes per side. Once browned remove the chickens from the pan.

Add the onion and carrots and cook whilst stirring until the onion is browned, somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. Stir in the garlic, let it cook for about a minute - still stirring. Add the rest of the dryrub, the vinegar, jalapenos, wine and stock.

Put the chicken back in, skin side up, and make sure to push it down well in the onions. Bring the mixture to a very gentle simmer. Lid on and keep simmering very, very, gently for about 15 minutes or until the chicken is just cooked.

Serve with rice and perhaps some hot sauce on the side.

Enjoy!