Since exhausting all of my go-to Korean recipes, I’ve been looking into new cultural influences to draw from.
I’ve found that many of the recipes that caught my attention were of the same origins: Asian and Italian. Having familiarized myself with these two types of cuisine, I guess that shouldn’t have been too surprising…but it didn’t help my cause of switching things up, either.
I did some serious soul searching, narrowing down my favorite foods to both eat and cook and it came down to the following groups:
- Seafood
- pasta
- chicken
My Italian grandmother taught me recipes that highlight each of these quite well. But it wasn’t until I was going through my recipe arsenal that it hit me…my Portuguese grandmother had a few tricks up her sleeve as well; and I had never tried cooking Portuguese style.
With this new-found inspiration, I began a new search and instantly struck gold. I have so many new ideas that I think I’ll keep busy for the rest of the winter. That being said, my first attempt was a easy recipe for stewed chicken. I wanted to start off underwhelmed, just in case things decided to go wrong…
I’ve decided to make a few modifications to the original recipe, just to appease my own personal tastes. Here is what I used:
- 1-2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs
- Amaral Portuguese style chourico
- 1 can of whole tomatoes, smashed
- 1 cup chicken stock or seasoned water (I used a mix of salt, pepper and garlic powder)
- 1/2 cup red wine
- 3 large cloves of garlic, smashed
- 1 can of large black olives, drained
- 1 large onion, finely diced
- 1 bay good sized bay leaf
- 1 teaspoon paprika
- 1 teaspoon rosemary finely ground
- pinch sugar
- salt & pepper to taste
Word of warning: there IS a difference between Mexican chorizo and Portuguese chourico. From a basic standpoint, chorizo is often spicy and is a raw product whereas chourico is a pre-cooked smoked meat and, therefore, has a smoky flavor profile. This strongly affects the flavor of this dish, so be sure to use the correct one!
I seasoned my chicken with kosher salt before browning both sides in a tall pan. Once the chicken was browned, I literally left it in the pan, turned the heat down from high to medium-high and added the rest of the ingredients, stirring only occasionally.
Looks good, right?
Prep time for this recipe took MAYBE 5-10 minutes; cook time took about 90 minutes to break everything down and meld the flavors together. For a twist, I shredded the chicken instead of serving it as whole pieces.
This recipe had a number of perks:
- One-pan dish. Makes for easy clean up
- meal prep < cook time
- Leaves plenty of left overs to freeze for later
Because I was sharing this with a friend, we chose to serve it over shells – though I would imagine serving it over rice would be just as delicious.
Views from the dish.
This recipe can be on the salty side, due to the sausage, but is one Id definitely make again.
A Picky Eater's Adventure in Food 