Serves 4-8
This is simple comfort food, just how it should be. If you like your casserole enough, serve the chicken straight from this in the centre of the table
- You could toss the chicken pieces in flour seasoned with a little salt and pepper, before you brown them. Don’t burn them.
- You could thicken the juices with some roux at the very end, and then pour back on the chicken and vegetables.
Ingredients
- 450g (1lb) piece of streaky bacon cut into 2cm chunks
- 4 tbsp olive oil
- 1 chicken, jointed into 8 pieces
- 4 med carrots, peeled and cut into 4cm chunks, or 12 baby carrots, scrubbed and left whole
- 10 baby onions, peeled (or 4 med onions, peeled and halved), red onions are good too
- 6-8 garlic cloves, peeled
- 400ml (3/4 pint) chicken stock or failing that water
- Sprig of thyme/rosemary/sage
Method
- Put the bacon into a small saucepan of cold water and bring up to the boil to remove excess salt.
- Drain, and dry the bacon on kitchen paper. Heat up a frying pan, add 2 tbsp olive oil, sauté the bacon until nice and golden and crispy, remove to a casserole, add the chicken to the pan, adding more oil if necessary, saute the chicken for a few minutes until golden, then remove to the casserole and sauté the carrots, onions and garlic for a minute, seasoning with salt and pepper, adding them to the other sauted ingredients in the casserole.
- Deglaze the frying pan by adding the stock to the frying pan over a high heat and dissolving all the juices on the bottom.
- Then pour the stock into the casserole, add a sprig of thyme or rosemary or sage and put into an oven at 160c for about 45 min or until cooked.
- Strain the juices, if you like (if you have not added flour at the start) and spoon any fat off the top, add back in to the stew.
- Sprinkle with some chopped parsley if you like.
- Serve with mashed potatoes.
- **NOTE Of course you could put potatoes on top of this in the casserole, like the Irish stew.
- **NOTE You could also add 150ml white wine into the stock when you are deglazing the pan.
- **NOTE If you want the juices to be slightly thick you can do 2 things