Chicken thighs with vegetables

Raquel, author of Los Tragaldabas, talks to us today about that traditional chup chup, that way of cooking and flavours of yesteryear that we love to recover and savour. To do so, she brings us a recipe that is not at all complicated, which with just a few minutes of preparation and a little patience for it to finish cooking, can result in an exquisite recipe. I encourage you to try it!

Today I bring you a recipe that is not only very simple but also delicious. At home we love chicken, I think it is a meat that can be used a lot, and we can prepare it in a thousand ways depending on the part we are going to cook.

Personally, I love chicken breast, even though it is the driest part, it is the one I like the most. Unlike my children, whose favourite part is the thighs. The combination of chicken thighs with vegetables results in a simply delicious dish, a very traditional recipe, cooked in a slow-cooked way like in the old days. This is really how food keeps all its flavour, in the kitchen like almost everything in life, it only needs time and love.

To make the drumsticks I used my blue mineral cocotte from Le Creuset , it couldn't be prettier, right? Just like the other cocottes: due to the type of recipe it is, you can perfectly make it in other cast iron cocottes, either the low cocotte or the saucepan type . Cooking in a cocotte gives you the assurance that your dish will be made in the most traditional way, the heat will be perfectly distributed throughout the cocotte and it will be cooked perfectly. When you cook in this type of cast iron containers, you must keep the heat at medium temperature to ensure a perfect final result.

The choice of ingredients is very important, I always prefer to buy free range chicken, it certainly has a more intense flavour and the texture of the meat is different from that of normal chicken. The vegetables, just like the meat, must be the best, a dish starts with the ingredients and the final result will depend on them. This recipe allows for all the vegetables that we like the most and, above all, we can adapt it to seasonal vegetables, because we can eat it all year round.

Ingredients

• 800gr of chicken thighs
• 1 zucchini
• 3 carrots
• 2 red onions
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 3 ripe tomatoes
• Laurel
• Salt
• Pepper
• Chicken soup
• Extra virgin olive oil

Preparation of the recipe

1. We put a generous splash of olive oil in our cocotte, covering the base, and heat over medium heat.
2. We add the vegetables, the whole garlic cloves, the onion cut into quarters, the carrot cut into thin slices, the courgette cut into not too small cubes, and the tomatoes cut into quarters. The idea is to have a thick sauce in which the vegetables have a presence.
3. Sauté everything until golden, add the chicken legs, season with salt and pepper and add the bay leaf. Sauté together with the vegetables until golden.
4. Add the chicken broth until it covers the thighs. Put the heat on medium-low and stir occasionally until the sauce reduces.
5. Serve directly in your cocotte. You can accompany it with some steamed potatoes.
6. These types of stews are much better if we make them the day before. We will get them to settle and the flavour will be much more concentrated.