Chicken in almond sauce, from the Castile-La Mancha region of Spain. This is a good example of a dish that takes on the subdued tones of winter but isn’t boring, in which the flavor is more complex than a conventional roast or a stew, but you don’t take the easy way out by drowning everything in spices. Braise chicken thighs in chicken broth with onions, two bay leaves, and about three-fourths of a teaspoon of cinnamon. Ten minutes before it’s done, add a modified version of a picada by roasting half a cup of almonds on the stove with five cloves of garlic, and blending to form a paste. Add a pinch of saffron to the broth. The recipe says to blend two hard-boiled egg yolks into the almond and garlic sauce, but I omitted that step in the interest of making it healthier. One thing I might have done was add a hard-boiled egg to the broth alongside the chicken, as one might do with an Ethiopian doro wat, a dish which for some reason I think this resembles. I served it with Japanese somen noodles on the side: nothing Spanish about them, but they have a silky texture and they’re great at soaking up the broth.
(Photo: Casa de Campo park, Madrid. Recipe is from The Food of Spain by Claudia Roden.)
365 Days of Food 