Sunday 2 December 2007

Moroccan Style chicken and Apricots with Quinoa

I finally made this on Sunday rather than Friday as it takes a while to cook and I wasn't organised enough on Friday. However that said it is easy to make and once preped just sits in the oven for a couple of hours.

Ingredients
4 very large chicken thighs (or 6-8 normal ones)
1 tsp each of cinnamon, ginger and cumin
olive oil
1 onion ( my last one was soft so I used a leek)
about 5 cloves of garlic
1 large carrot
couple of hand fulls of dried apricots
about 1/2 tsp each salt and pepper
chicken stock (I used a GF cube)

Quinoa
sultanas

I deboned the thighs and chopped them in half but mostly because they were very large, if preferred you can cook them on the bone or use a different cut of chicken. Leave the pieces fairly large.

Mix the three spices together and sprinkle on the meat then rub in.

Heat oil in a oven proof metal casserole then brown off the meat. Chop the onion (leek), garlic and carrot and add to the pan and season with salt and pepper, cook off slightly. Chop apricots roughly and add to pan. Finally add enough stock to mostly cover the meat and vegs.

Place in the oven and cook for around 2 hours at 160C.

When the meat is falling apart prepare the Quinoa by cooking in twice as much water or stock by volume as the amount of Quinoa you use. Once pretty much all the water is absorbed add some sultanas and put the lid on to allow them to plump up a little.

The finished dish is thick and dark with the meat falling apart, most of the ingredients have combined to make a wonderful thick, soft sauce so it doesn't photograph that well but tastes great.

6 comments:

  1. That looks lovely. What are sultanas? I've never heard of them.

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  2. Sultanas are like a lighter (golden) form of a raisin we can easily get raisins (biggish, dark), sultanas(medium, paler, sweet) and currents(small, dark and harder) here. All are slightly different forms of dried grapes.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultana_(grape)

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  3. Ahhh... We have those here too. We just call them golden raising. Sultanas is a much more fun, exotic name =)

    Mary Frances
    www.glutenfreecookingschool.com

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  4. MMMM looks mouth watering esther. Just what we need on these cold winter days pure comfort food.

    Rosie x

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  5. It was very tasty and really easy as it is pretty much bung in the oven and come back later.

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