Chicken on Coke. Haha. Hmm.. Anyway, I learnt of cooking chicken this way from a friend who is a wonderful cook. I learnt it last year and only today am using this technique. It seems like only yesterday when the whole lot came over and we decided to do a cookout at my place.
Back to the chicken. I marinated in for several hours. The marinade? Smoked paprika (lots of it please), dried mint (a bit), onion powder, garlic powder, safflower (the cheaper version of saffron), salt, zaatar (Arabic thyme), spice mixture (cardamom, cumin, fennel, cinnamon toasted and blended) and brown sugar. I rubbed it into the chicken and added just a wee bit of olive oil onto the chicken and then let it sit, covered, in the fridge till dinner time.
Then, I roasted it together with some vegetables. Potatoes, Japanese sweet potato, carrots and cauliflower. This roasting of cauliflower is new to me. I’ve been watching several cooking episodes where they feature roasted cauliflower so I decided to try.
The result? I overcooked the dish a bit so the vegetables were soft but still delicious because they had flavour. Oh yes, I seasoned the vegetables first with salt, black pepper, olive oil and the spice mixture. The chicken was wonderful because of the intense marinade. But I realise by cooking the chicken in this manner, the drumstick area didn’t crisp up. Hmmm, I will need to go back to my friend on how she resolved that. But the chicken was juicy and tender and so so flavourful.
The leftover chicken breasts (as usual, nobody wanted the breasts though they were very juicy) were made into sandwiches to be eaten for tomorrow’s breakfast. I coated the shredded chicken with some more of the pan juices and stuffed it into the panini sandwich from Gardenia.
The Occasional Cook 