Thursday, January 16, 2014

My Sister's Phenomenal Green Chicken from Nom Nom Paleo

I actually made Nom Nom Paleo's "My Sister's Phenomenal Green Chicken" a few months ago and was side tracked from sharing it as I received a few cook books that needed attention.  I'm glad I was side tracked, as this recipe actually shows up in Michelle Tam and Henry Fong's new cook Nom Nom Paleo:  Food for Humans as Fiona's Green Chicken.

I decided to use chicken thighs.


I started by preparing the marinade.  You basically fill your blender with the various herbs and spices and then blend until smooth.  



You don't need a fancy VitatechBlendMix blender to complete this task.  


Once the marinate was smooth, I checked it for seasoning.  This marinate is quite pungent.  Don't taste too much.  I put the marinate and the chicken in a resealable plastic bag.  I made sure the green stuff covered all of the chicken before putting it into a bowl in my refrigerator for about 13 hours.  

I decided to bake my chicken rather than grill it.  When I made this recipe, there was a discrepancy between the printable instructions and the actual blog post regarding how long the chicken should be left out of the fridge before cooking to come to room temperature.  That has been resolved.  I've not checked what the cookbook version says.  I took the chicken out of the refrigerator and let it come to room temperature for an hour.  With about 20 minutes left in that hour, I turned my oven on to pre-heat. 

After the hour had passed, I placed the chicken on a foil covered sheet pan with wire rack.

I put the chicken in the oven and set a timer for 20 minutes so I could flip it.  


After 40 minutes in the oven, I checked the temperature and decided to leave it in for 5 minutes more.  


Here is the finished chicken.  



Accessibility & Cost of Ingredients: You should be able to find most of the ingredients at your "big box" grocery store.  You may have to go to Whole Foods or your Asian market for the Red Boat fish sauce.  While at the Asian market, you may want to pick up the fresh herbs needed as they are cheaper there.  The recipe calls for Aleppo pepper.  I've only seen that at Penzey's.  

Preparation & Cooking Time:  It took me 12 minutes to prepare the marinade and chicken to marinate in the fridge for about 13 hours.  I cooked the chicken for 45 minutes.  


Clean Up:  Everything I used went into the dishwasher and the plastic bag went into the garbage.  


The Paleo Review:  Thumbs Up!  First, the finished chicken is quite pretty.  Not only is it visually appealing, its quite tasty as well.  It has a nice pesto flavor.  There is just a hint of the mint flavor.  I let my friend Martha try this chicken and she agreed that they had a "nice good flavor."  I'd put this is a solid good flavored dish category of my recipe binder.