comfort food

I made what my friend Tia calls "magic chicken" for supper today; she was introduced to the recipe by her friend Amylee when she was very sick and couldn't eat anything. The magic chicken got her back on her feet in no time, she swears. When she first wrote about it I was intrigued, but it was still about 100 degrees here, so I tucked it away in my memory.

DH has been encouraging me to do more with the crockpot, especially with chicken. I admit I have been hesitant, since chicken done in the crockpot is, to me, usually over-done. But since the weather has finally cooled off and I didn't feel like doing anything labor intensive for dinner, I bought some drumsticks just to make this chicken. I went with the drumsticks because dark meat stands up to the crockpot better than the white meat does, and because they have 1) bones and 2) less connective tissue and other "junk" in them than do the boneless thighs.

It's not so much a recipe as a method, but here goes:

Magic Chicken

about 3 lbs chicken, bone-in, skin on, cut up
1/4 - 1/2 C soy sauce
1/4 - 1/2 C apple cider vinegar
2 T - 1/4 C honey
2 tsp - 2 T garlic, minced
2 tsp - 2 T fresh ginger

Put the chicken in your crockpot. If you like a lot of broth to get something like soup, use the larger amounts. If you want a smaller amount of liquid to thicken up as a gravy, use the smaller amounts. Either way, it will be delicious. Combine the other ingredients and pour over the chicken. Cover and cook on low until the meat falls off the bone -- 4 to 6 hours. I encourage you not to leave this all day, because then the meat becomes very dry, and I dislike the texture it takes on.

I recommend serving this with rice or something else you can use to sop up all the good broth. We had it with rice and peas, and I stripped the meat of the bones and stirred it all together with lots of broth for instant soup. This is the kind of food that's hard to stop eating.

Note, though, that the kids thought it tasted vaguely like Chinese food, but still "weird," so if you have finicky children you might not want to spring this on them. You can play with the ratios of soy sauce/cider vineger/honey, too. I use more honey than Tia does because I'm trying to get the kids to eat it, and I wanted to balance the salty and sour flavors of the soy and vinegar. But Tia loves hers with just a trickle of honey, so feel free to tweak the amounts.

One last thing to note -- don't skim off the fat, especially if you're making this because you're under the weather. The chicken fat has wonderful healing properties of its own you don't want to be tossing out!