Honey-Wine Braised Chicken Thighs with Spinach

My mission: To cook 5 recipes from Cooking Light Magazine each month. 

This is recipe 5 of 5 for the month.

Ingredients:

1 Dutch Oven

2 1/2 teaspoons dark sesame oil

5 skinless, boneless chicken thighs (as many as Mr. Perdue gives you)

1 chopped red onion (Cooking Light says 2 cups of onions but I'm not putting onions in a measuring cup)

1 cup fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth

1/3 cup Shaoxing (Chinese rice wine) or dry sherry

2 1/2 tablespoons minced peeled fresh ginger

3 tablespoons oyster sauce

2 tablespoons honey

4 garlic cloves, minced

1 bag of spinach

NOTE: The recipe from Cooking Light lives here and it features a few changes. One such change is mustard greens. However, I couldn't find mustard greens at 2 markets so i went with spinach. One guy told me he didn't have mustard greens but he had mustard. Thanks, dummy! Another omission on my part is sesame seeds. I actually have them somewhere in my kitchen but it's really not even worth the effort of toasting sesame seeds and then adding them to the dish. Plus, if you go out and buy a jar of sesame seeds for this recipe, guess what? You now own a ridiculous amount of sesame seeds till the end of time!

You really should click on the link for this recipe because it takes a good 90 minutes from start to finish to cook. It also requires a dutch oven. I didn't own a dutch oven until an ex gave me one for a birthday present. It blew my mind. So you put the sesame oil in the dutch oven on high heat and place the chicken in there. At this time you should also preheat the oven. After 4 minutes you turn the chicken and let it cook for another 4 minutes. At this point you dump the onions in there and let that cook for 4 minutes. Then pour the broth and the wine in there and cook that for 4 minutes. Now comes the fun part: dump in the garlic, ginger, oyster sauce, and honey in there. I never ever take note of how much honey I use. I just squeeze. Sue me. After everything is mixed around slap the cover on it and fire it into the oven for 30 minutes.

NOTE: Make sure your oven racks are at the right height to fit the dutch oven with the lid on it. Because handling a rack at 350 degrees with only one oven mitt is super annoying.

While that's in the oven go watch a DVR'd episode of How I Met Your Mother. It's nice to know someone (Ted) is worse at dating than me.

30 minutes later take out the dutch oven and put it on the stove on low heat and open the lid! Looks good right? Smells even better! Take two forks and shred the chicken in there. Once that is done turn up the heat to medium and add some spinach and then cover for 5 minutes and then stir and repeat this process until you are out of spinach. Cook for 15 more minutes and then serve.

Final Product:

Great tasting dish but it takes an eternity to cook. 90 minutes for chicken? If I got home at 6pm and just started cooking maybe I wouldn't mind so much but, I was out jogging and bought a copy of The Wonder City comic, ran to the supermarket for ginger and spinach. I didn't eat until 9:30! It's worth the effort though. I made some Trader Joe's fried rice to put under it as a bed because I didn't have time or patience to make anything else.

3 out of 5 stars!

Leftovers: Cooked in the microwave for 2 minutes and the chicken holds up really well. The fragrance of the ginger wafts (that's a word right?) through the office and gets my Annoying Coworkers (TM) jealous.