I really like the simplicity and deliciousness of this recipe. You can make it more complicated, but I don’t know that makes it better. You can do this all in one go (4 hours), or you can split it into two days. Both are good, but food always tastes best when it’s had some time together.

You can pretty make this dish with anything. The core of this recipe is to slow cook something in wine, stock and aromatic veggies, then let it sit around for a while. If you do that, it will taste great.

Ingredients

  • 1 or 2 Chicken legs per person
  • 2 or 3 Slabs of bacon
  • 1 Onion
  • 2 Stalks Celery
  • 2 Carrots
  • 2 Handfuls of Mushrooms
  • 12 Stalks of Thyme
  • 1 Bay Leaf
  • 1 Box of Chicken Stock (maybe 500ml)
  • 750ml Red Wine (1 Bottle Pinon Noir)
  • Optional: potatoes, parsnips, turnip, pretty much any veggie
  • About a cup of Flour
  • Two table spoons of tomato paste
  • Two garlic cloves

Instructions

  • Coat the chicken thighs in Salt & Pepper, and then flour. I use a pie plate because it is flat and wide. Don’t over think this.
  • Pour the bottle of wine and the box of chicken stock in your dutch oven. Add the two table spoons of tomato paste. Add two table spoons of olive oil.
  • Sautee the bacon in a frying pan with a couple table-spoons of water. Once you have them browned and have created enough bacon grease to fry things in, push the bacon aside and brown the following items in the pan (add butter if you start running out of bacon grease): Flour-coated chicken, Mushrooms, Onions.
  • Then put them in the dutch oven (including the bacon, which you might want to cut into smaller pieces first).
  • Add the carrots, celery, Bay Leaf, Garlic and Thyme into the dutch oven (if you are anal retentive, you can put the Thyme & Bay Leaf in cheese cloth for easy removal later)
  • Set the Dutch oven in your refrigerator and wait 1 day
  • Next day… cook the dutch oven in your stove for 2.5 hours at 325 degrees fahrenheit
  • Take it out and simmer it on your stove top (without the lid) for another hour or so to reduce the liquid down by 30-40%.
  • Then you can thicken the juices by adding flour. The anal retentive will want to gently strain out the liquid and add flour to it before recombining. But I usually just pour the flour in with everything and poke/ stir until the flour dissolves.
  • Eat. Drink. Be Merry!