Chicken in Vinegar

It sounds gross, right? But . . no! It’s great. Someone mentioned it on the Italian cooking group the other day and I’ve had it before but couldn’t remember what it tasted like so I decided to make it today.

I had gone through recipes and there are tons of them and they’re all so different. Some use balsamic, some use plain white vinegar, some use red wine vinegar. Some add a bunch of veggies. I kinda just went off on my own and it was delicious. Vince said “You hit this one out of the park!” He loved it.

The photo below shows the chicken after it was first roasted (not yet done though), the chopped carrots, sliced onions, chopped Castelvetrano olives, the red wine vinegar and red wine and the thyme and bay leaves. The other additional ingredients were a can of tomatoes and 2 T. Better than Bouillon, chicken flavored.

Basically, this is what I did. I am not good at following a recipe or writing it all down. Vince said “Please remember how you made that!” Hmm . . when was the last time I remembered anything?

1. Cut a whole chicken into quarters, plus two additional breasts with skin and bones. Seasoned those with salt, pepper and cajun seasoning.
2. Browned them in a mix of butter and olive oil.
3. Removed the chicken to a baking dish and roasted (convection at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes).
4. While chicken was roasting, I added two chopped carrrots, two sliced onions, and two T. chopped garlic to the drippings where the chicken was browned. I cooked those til the carrots were tender.
5. Add 1 cup chopped Castelvetrano olives, 2 springs fresh thyme, two bay leaves, 1-1/2 cups red wine vinegar, 1 cup red wine, 1 can diced tomatoes, 2 T. chicken flavored Better than Bouillon.
6. Bring that to a boil. Pour it back over the chicken and place it in the oven, uncovered, and bake for an hour.

I wasn’t sure if it was going to be good over pasta because of all the vinegar so I tasted some of the liquid after it was done cooking and it seemed perfect – tart but not too vinegary.

When I was looking at recipes yesterday, several of them called for Castelvetrano olives. I looked at Amazon to see if they had them and they seemed a bit outrageously expensive so I was thinking I’d just use plain green olives, which I now know would have been fine, but this morning, when I woke up, the first thing I asked Vince . . Remember those green olives we used to buy with the seeds in them? What were they called? He couldn’t remember but I dug around in the pantry and look what I found! I saw three jars . . there may be more. I only used one but I used them all.

It was a bit time consuming, mainly because I didn’t know what I was doing and kept going back to multiple recipes to see if I was missing anything I wanted to include.

We have enough left for two more meals so the time was well spent. I don’t mind several hours in the kitchen when there are three meals at the end of that one cooking session.

We had steamed broccoli and rolls along with the chicken and pasta. My husband is a happy man tonight! 🙂