Last Thursday we came in the back door at 8:04 p.m. with a seven-year-old covered in red infield dirt from his knees to his eyebrows, and supper was already done. It had been done since 5:20. It was sitting in a warm oven in the Lodge Dutch oven with the lid on, waiting for us.
Jack's rec league plays on Saturdays most of the season, but April storms rained out four Saturdays in a row, and the league moved the make-up games to weeknights. First pitch is 6:15. That means leaving the house at 5:35 to find parking and get his cleats tied, and a game runs about an hour and a half if nobody walks six batters in a row, which somebody always does. We get home somewhere between 7:50 and 8:15, hungry and loud.
I get home from school around 4:15. That gives me about an hour to start something that will hold for three, and this is the something.
Ingredients
- 6 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (about 2 1/2 pounds)
- 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt, divided
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 1 teaspoon paprika
- 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 medium onion, diced
- 2 carrots, diced
- 2 ribs celery, diced
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 1/2 cups long-grain white rice
- 3 cups chicken broth, plus 1/2 cup more for holding
- 1 teaspoon dried thyme
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 cup frozen peas
- Juice of half a lemon
How I make it
- Heat the oven to 350°F. Pat the thighs dry and season them with 1 teaspoon of the salt, the pepper and the paprika.
- Heat the oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high. Lay the thighs in skin side down and leave them alone for 6 to 7 minutes, until the skin is deep golden and lets go of the pot on its own. Flip for 1 minute, then move them to a plate. Pour off all but about 2 tablespoons of fat.
- Add the butter, onion, carrots, celery and the last 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cook 5 minutes, until the onion is soft. Stir in the garlic for 30 seconds, then the rice, and stir 2 minutes until the edges of the grains look see-through.
- Pour in 3 cups of broth, add the thyme and bay leaf and bring it to a boil, scraping up the brown bits. Set the thighs on top, skin side up, with any juice from the plate. Cover and bake 35 minutes.
- It's done when the rice is tender, the broth is absorbed and the meat pulls away from the bone with clear juices. If you have a probe, the thighs should read at least 175°F.
- Eating now? Stir the peas in around the chicken, cover 5 minutes, squeeze the lemon over and serve.
- Leaving for a game? Pour the extra 1/2 cup of broth around the edge of the pot (not over the skin), scatter the peas on top, put the lid back on, turn the oven down to its 170°F warm setting and slide the pot back in. It holds well for up to 3 hours. A 170°F oven keeps the food above 140°F, which is the line for holding hot food safely.
Why the extra half cup? Rice doesn't stop absorbing liquid just because it's cooked. The starch keeps soaking up whatever moisture is around it, and in a warm oven a little steam escapes even with the lid on. That last half cup is what the rice drinks while you're in the bleachers, so it comes out tender instead of glued down.
I know this because the first time I tried it, I didn't add it. We came home to rice welded to the bottom of the pot in a crust Ryan had to soak overnight. Jack gave it a 5 out of 10, "because the top part was good."
The 8 o'clock version
Some nights I don't make it home in time to start the slow one. For those, I keep cooked rice in the chest freezer, frozen flat in quart bags on the weekend. I cut 1 1/2 pounds of boneless thighs into 1-inch pieces and brown them in the same Dutch oven over medium-high for 6 minutes, add the diced vegetables for 4 minutes, then the frozen rice, 1/2 cup broth and the peas. Lid on, low heat, 8 minutes, stirring once, until the rice is hot and no chicken is pink inside. Supper by 8:20. It's not as good as the baked one, but it's hot and it's real food.
Swaps: chop the vegetables Sunday and keep them in a zip bag. Stick with long-grain white rice here; brown rice needs about an hour and more broth, and it doesn't hold the same way.
The whole pot costs about $12, with bone-in thighs at $1.99 a pound, and it feeds four with one lunch left over. School let out yesterday, so baseball nights just got a lot easier. Next week Ryan smokes forty chicken thighs for my department's end-of-school cookout, so we are about to be very serious chicken-thigh people.
