Easy Spicy Chicken

Deciding to continue our recent success with recetas nuevas, on Sunday afternoon I took An Appetite for Passion from the shelf. For the long version of our interest in this book -- which has nothing to do with the author and everything to do with the writer of its forward -- see our 2014 Cooking in the Car post.

I include a photo of the book cover because it is much more attractive than a photo of the dinner would be. Delicious food is not always photogenic. 

Thumbing through the thin volume for dinner ideas, I noticed that many of the recipes are for seafood, but we would not have a chance to get to the fishmonger before Monday. And I no longer buy seafood at the regular grocery store. If there are not boats behind the store, I'm probably not buying fish there. I might be moving this book to the shelf of our ocean-proximate kitchen in Fairhaven.

The book has a lot of desserts and breakfasts, which could serve as a dinner. But I kept turning pages. At least two recipes call for venison, duck, or other meats that I am not set up to bring in, as it were. 

But then I saw a simple recipe for spiced roast chicken. I do often roast chickens, as readers of this blog know. But I decided that this recipe could succeed with the boneless chicken breasts that are part of our weekly dairy delivery. 

Preparation was very simple. In a small bowl, I combined brown sugar, ground cinnamon, cumin, red pepper flakes, fresh-ground black pepper, ground coriander, chili powder and just a little salt. I crunched these together thoroughly with a teaspoon. 

The recipe calls for rubbing this mixture under the skin of the chicken before roasting -- much as I have done with Thanksgiving turkeys in recent years. (In fact, I might just spice up next week's turkey just a little next week.) I knew that these chicken breasts would be delicious and tender, but with no surface fat to work with. So I turned them in a bowl with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil before rubbing on the sugar-spice mixture.

I then heated a mixture of oil and butter in an indispensable cast-iron skillet, adding the breasts when the pan was hot enough to sear them. After 2-3 minutes, I turned them, searing the other side. I then lowered the heat and began to prepare the side dish -- just leftover brown rice that I fried in another skillet, scrambling in one farm-fresh egg from our friend's chickens.

I served this with some chilled cranberry sauce -- a delicious mix of flavors, temperatures, and textures. We often write that our meal paired well with Malbec from Mendoza, but this time it was an exceptional pairing. Highly recommend.