Yes, we went on a two-week road trip to Spring Training, the Red Rocks of Sedona, and a mini-reunion in Boise. You are expecting – nay, demanding pictures from that trip. I’m working on them. But when on the road it’s sometimes hard to fall asleep in a hotel bed. On those nights I would lull myself to sleep by thinking of some recipes I planned to cook when I got home. I’ve been following the I Am A Food Blog by “Steph” and her recipes look promising.
Because we ate so many hamburgers and other junk on the road I was craving chicken so I picked Steph’s Oven-Baked Sesame Chicken Thighs. Lots of garlic and ginger promised to make a tangy, tasty treat with a minimum of ingredients and fuss. You can find Steph’s write-up and recipe here or my short-cut recipe here.
If I weren’t taking pictures for the blog I wouldn’t have dirtied all these ramekins. The onions and toasted sesame seeds will be garnishes so don’t go into the sauce.
The sauce looked yummy
I think pictures of raw chicken are totally gross so I won’t publish the pre-roasted chicken. I will show you the picture of the pan I wanted to cook them in. I originally bought this pan to serve as a rotisserie drip pan, but it is way, way too nice to be wrecked on the grill. But it was a little too big for only six chicken thighs. Steph recommends scrunching the pieces of chicken together.
After braising in a 375° oven for 35 minutes they were done. I really like this USA Pan. In addition to this pan we have a 9×13 and a half sheet. Love, love, love them. They were rated as “Recommended” by America’s Test Kitchen (subscription required to see page). These pans are about ½ the cost of the fancy blue one.
We served it with some white rice and salad. We sprinkled some of the onions and toasted sesame seeds on the rice. Then I added some Nong’s Khao Man Gai Sauce. This stuff is delicious! It has some nice ginger and garlic highlights to match the chicken. Nong came to Portland from Thailand in 2003 and opened a chicken food cart. The cart is on 4th street in the pod near the PSU engineering building. You can buy the sauce locally in stores (e.g. New Seasons). You can also mail order it. This stuff is so, so good.
Dinner is served
Did I tell you we went to Arizona? We spent one night in Seligman on Route 66 and bought a wine glass. We should have bought two: Carla and I had to flip a coin to see who got to use it.
This dinner was good, but not great. I like chicken thighs; they are better for us than red meat and have more flavor than chicken breasts which are unforgiving and often end up dry. My two favorite chicken thigh recipes are ridiculously good baked chicken thighs from Mike Vrobel and brine-grilled chicken from epicurious.com. That being said, you might like this recipe. As I noted in my recipe, it would have been smart to defat the juices and reduced the sauce for a while to intensify the flavor. Now why didn’t I think of that when cooking dinner?
Rating: ★★ 2 out of 5 star.There are better ways to cook chicken thighs
A note on all the product links. I don’t get any money or consideration from Amazon for the links to the products. I may set up a merchant account some day but it seems like lots of work for little payback for my little blog. I link to the original author because they are the ones who did the work to create the recipes. I don’t want to plagiarize their work.
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