Roasted Chicken Thighs Part II

Well, it has been a really long time since I have posted anything. It's not because I've been lazy with my posting, it's because I've been lazy with my cooking. I haven't touched my Dutch oven in over a year and a half I think. That's kind of sad I guess, but I'm still gaining weight, so it apparently hasn't stopped me from eating.

Ever since I did my first Roasted Chicken Thighs dish I have wanted to try again, mainly because it wasn't very good. After getting some great feedback on ideas that might make it better I decided to try again and incorporate some of those ideas.



Above you can see the ingredients that I used for this dish. I purchased two whole chickens and cut them, saving the thighs and legs for this dish. I cut off all the excess skin but left enough to neatly cover the meat. I then lightly coated the chicken with olive oil, mainly just to help hold the spices that I would rub on them. This included some salt and pepper and a whole bunch of thyme. I also prepared four slices of thick-cut bacon and a bowl with one chopped bell pepper, one half a chopped onion, and a bunch (technical I know) of cloves of garlic.




Taking advice that I needed to have my fire hotter underneath and to use some type of real fat, I put enough coals under the pot to cover basically every square inch underneath and began cooking the bacon for its grease and to be used as part of the dish.



Once the bacon had cooked pretty well, I added the bowl of onion, peppers, and garlic and began cooking them in the bacon grease.





After they were pretty well ready, I scooted everything over to one side and added the chicken, skin side down, to the grease to brown and begin cooking.





I flipped the chicken and turned the pot periodically until it looked good. I guess it may have cooked about thirty to forty minutes. I scooped it all out onto one plate as seen in the opening photo from this post. My wife and I sat down at the patio table with that one plate and two forks and ate every bite of it. Oh yeah, redemption......feels good......and tastes better.

Thanks again to everyone who offered advice on things I could do to make it better.

Peach cobbler

Well, I made a peach cobbler this weekend at a Cub Scout campout at Brierfield State Park. I didn't have my camera handy, so I don't have any photos to post this time. Sorry.

Our Den had a family meal on Saturday evening. I was supposed to bring a desert, so I thought making the peach cobbler would be a kind of cool thing to do. I did a quick and easy one.

Basically, I just dumped a can of peaches in the pot, poured about 10-12 oz of 7-Up in, dumped a yellow cake mix on top, sprinkled some brown sugar and cinnamon on top and then put some pats of butter all around. Then I cooked it with a few coals on bottom and a good bit on top (pretty specific huh?) for about 40 minutes. Served it up. Not bad. Too bad we didn't have any ice cream.

Campfire Dutch Oven Pizza

Finally. Finally, I got to go outside and try another Dutch oven dish. It was a lot of fun to try something new regardless of the fact that it started raining part way through and I had to carry my coals around the house to shield them under the front porch...but...I digress.

I had a hankering for pizza and I had heard of folks cooking one in the Dutch oven, so I thought I would give it a try. What better place to turn when you are looking for a Dutch oven recipe than Byron's website, so I headed over there and sure enough picked up a pizza recipe. I guess one day I will run out of recipes to try off of his site, but I don't think it will be anytime soon.

I ran out to the supermarket and purchased everything I didn't have, fired up the coals, and prepared the ingredients. Here they all are spread out on my kitchen table. I have already mixed the Italian seasoning and garlic powder into the meat.





Then I started browning the meat as indicated in the recipe.





After removing the browned meat and setting it aside, I wiped out the Dutch oven with paper towels. Then added the olive oil, crescent roll dough, and pizza sauce.




Then I added my main ingredients. This was for the whole family and since we have differing tastes, I tried to divide it up some. The boys got no ingredients (cheese only), my wife got meat only, and I added a generous helping of black olives and mushrooms to mine.





Here it is with the cheese added and ready to be put on the fire.





I have this thing on the coals now. I cooked it for about 25 minutes, rotating the pot and lid in alternate directions every 5 - 10 minutes or so. In hindsight, 20 minutes may have been better. The dough didn't get burned in the most technical sense of the word, but it was getting close.





Here is the finished product. It turned out very well. I think that one day I would like to try and make some homemade pizza dough and do the same thing over again. I've just always wanted to make homemade pizza dough, I can't explain it. Also, getting this pizza out of the Dutch oven whole proved to be impossible. So, I just sort of cut it into fourths in the pot and scooped the four pieces out.




Thanks again Byron for another fine recipe.

Peach Cobbler

Well, I finally decided it was about time to try to cook a desert. After all it was a desert that first piqued my interest in the Dutch oven.

So once again I turned to Byron Bill's website for a recipe. This time I settled in on the Fruit Cobbler Delight. The recipe can be found here. I have to admit that I did change one thing on this though. My wife doesn't like fruit cocktail so I substituted another 30 oz. can of peaches for the 30 oz. can of fruit cocktail.




Here are all of the ingredients ready to add to the pot (except the cake mix, I forgot to put it in the picture, whoops!). I had pre-measured the spices, sugar, and tapioca.





Basically you just dump the fruit, tapioca, and spices in and stir them around. You can see the result above.






Then you sprinkle the cake mix on top of the liquid, sprinkle the brown sugar on top of that, and dab butter all over. Now it's ready to go on the coals.





I cooked it with 12 coals on top and 12 on bottom per the directions and rotated the pot and lid every 10 minutes or so. I let it cook for about 55 minutes.

This is what you get, a fabulous peach cobbler. You can see a picture of it in a bowl approximately one minute prior to consumption at the top of this post. Warning though, this stuff is HOT!!! My waiting taste buds couldn't stand to wait for a cool-down, so now I have a scalded tongue . It was worth it though.

This is a great recipe, especially for folks who like fruit. I have a confession to make though. While I like fruit cobblers, I don't actually like to eat the fruit. I just like the crust and gooey stuff. So if I were cooking this just for myself I might cut it back to maybe one can of fruit to try and increase the crusty/gooey factor.

Also, while I have not yet had a hard time cleaning my Dutch oven, this sticky desert stuff has been harder to clean than the other things I have cooked . So, in the future, when cooking a desert, I may try to line the pot with foil.

Memorial Day Potatoes

Well, it has been a while since I have posted anything on here. Basically our family has been on a pretty tight budget lately and I just haven't been able to cook anything for the past few weeks.

On Memorial Day my in-laws came over to grill out. So I decided to cook a side dish of Moss Style Potatoes in the dutch oven. I did not take any photos since I have done this dish in the past. This time I cooked about 14-16 potatoes. This larger quantity cooked just fine in the same amount of time as a small batch. However, they did not brown as well as the smaller batch. I guess the amount of browning is just a function of how long the food sits against the bottom. More food = less bottom time. So, if you want browned potatoes either cook smaller batches or use a larger dutch oven.

What an Exciting Day

Wow! This is great! As I spend more time looking around on the net, I am finding more and more great resources for Dutch oven cooking. Not just some recipes in a book somewhere but real people out doing this stuff. This is great because you can really see people being creative with their dishes and gives me hope that maybe one day I can cook some neat stuff too.

I ran across Mark's Black Pot. What a great resource. He has been posting details of his experiences with the Dutch oven for over a year and has lots off good information and recipes. I look forward to try some of them soon.

Chicken and Potato Delight

After my success with the Hawaiian Braided Bread recipe that I got from Byron Bills Dutch Oven Cooking website, I decided to try another of his recipes. There are quite a few that I would like to try out, but the Chicken and Potato Delight really caught my eye. You can find the recipe here.

This seemed like a logical choice. After all, it has everything a growing boy needs: bacon, chicken, mushrooms, onions, potatoes, cheese, and sour cream. As I see it, it's only missing one on the Man's List of Good Foods, and that would be to somehow deep fry the whole thing when your done.

Let me say that I did kind of mess this one up a little bit, and it is something to be aware of. This recipe generates a huge amount of food. I realized that was the case because of how many pieces of chicken and potatoes it called for. But what I didn't notice is that the recipe clearly says to use a 12 inch deep dutch oven. I don't have a deep dutch oven and so had to reduce the amount of chicken and potatoes that I added. I still added the called for amount of the other ingredients, because I had prepared everything ahead of time. What this means is that mine turned out a bit more soup-like than proabably intended. While still very good, if you don't have a deep dutch oven, I would recommend adding as much of the main ingredients as possible and reducing the cream of chicken and mushroom soups. Also maybe draining some of the juice that accumulates as the chicken cooks would help too.



Here are my first ingredients to cook. The bacon goes in first. Then you add the onions, mushrooms, and chicken below.









Here I am trying to get my bacon to brown. This takes a good bit longer than you would think.




Here it is after adding the chicken, onions, and mushrooms and letting them cook. Here you can see the amount of juice that is produced from the chicken cooking. I left this in, which probably helped the taste to some extent but also contributed to the dish being more soup-like.

Also, it takes a while to get the bacon to brown and then to cook the chicken and onion , maybe thirty minutes. So what I did, and what you may want to do, is to start some additional charcoal while this cooks. After this stage you will be adding the other ingredients and it will require an additional forty-five minutes or so of cook time, so you will need that new charcoal to replace your first ones that have burned down by now.




Here is the dish after adding all of the remaining ingredients (except the cheese, which goes on last). Now it will need to cook for forty-five more minutes to cook the potatoes. At this stage you cook in a traditional manner with about twice as many coals on top as on bottom. I stirred this about every fifteen minutes and so didn't bother with rotating the pot or lid.





Here it is after fully cooking and everything is nice and done. All that is left to do is put the cheese on and let it melt. You can see the final product with the cheese at the very top of this post.

This turned out to be a very enjoyable dish. It tastes good and is actually very easy to prepare, but it does take a little work ahead of time just because you have so many ingedients and because there are large amounts of each ingredient. You have to kind of prepare everything ahead of time. About the only thing that you may want to not prepare ahead is the potatoes. If you slice them up at the beginning they will turn that brownish-pink color before you use them.

That said, I have enjoyed this dish very much. Next time I will try to make it a little more on the solid side and less on the soupy side.