Beat the heat with this oven-baked chicken dish for a filling family weeknight meal that doesn’t need too much effort. When making a chicken bake – a family favourite, always – it makes sense to give it a stamp of individuality. You could use curry spices, or go Moroccan, or use a thousand other spice mixes from the world of cuisines available to us – or you could do what I did this week: seek out a small range of spices that have something in common.
Like anise. For this simple weeknight bake, I chose star anise, fennel seeds, and fresh fennel from the garden. Then I used ground fennel to season the chicken, and a few more fennel seeds on top of them for luck.
Together, they would bring that aniseed bang to the dish, a pleasant focus to make it stand apart from other similar chicken and vegetable bakes. The vegetables go at the bottom of a casserole or baking dish just big enough to hold all the chicken thighs above them. The vegetables couldn’t be simpler: carrots, potatoes, and celery.
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Everything is being cooked in air fryers in my new home at the moment, in the absence of a working hob, but this dish could just as well be cooked in a big old conventional oven. And of course there’s garlic too. A note on differing air fryers: two of mine are “old-fashioned” ones (who would have thought we could already say that about air fryers?), the kind that has a drawer you can pull out, called a basket, and a rack at the base of that.
My new one (a 25l Kenwood) is more like a conventional oven — a countertop one with a door with a window in it, and a light inside the oven, which has two elements, above and below. So it’s much more like a big oven, only smaller. This is the machine that I baked this dish in, so this recipe applies either to this kind of oven or your old stove. 4 large carrots, peeled and sliced into long strips lengthwise
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