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.