Chicken tagine (using the ras el hanout)

Lazy, lazy. I bought the ingredients for this last weekend, and my rule of thumb is to try to use perishables within the week. So really, this is my last window to make this recipe before I kick myself and throw out some of the ingredients.

While I was researching the ras el hanout mix (can you call it research, if it's an hour's work on the internet? I like to think I was using at least some of the scientific skills I was taught in college, weeding through all this... data), I found this recipe for a chicken tagine. It looked good; most of the things it has in it, we like.

But this is not that recipe. I don't have a tagine pot, I don't have preserved lemons, I don't feel like measuring all those various spices out when most of them are already in my ras el hanout (and adding them in will muddy the ras el hanout experiment itself), and I can't cook chicken breasts to save my life. Actually, that's not true. I could cook them to save my life; they don't have to be good to provide enough sustenance for survival.

I'm not good with 95% lean ground beef, either. I think it's the lack of fat. It makes things hard to cook, and it pisses me off. I'm not into this low-fat thing. I mean, I'll buy olive oil and use it instead of butter or bacon grease; OK. And I can see the sense in not stuffing your face with deep-fried chicken and fries. But cutting fat out of every little thing, just for the sake of cutting fat? I don't trust it. Your brain is made with fats, you know. So chicken breasts can suck it. (I occasionally still try to find a way to cook them well, for the challenge of it. It galls me that the entire nation is all crazed for this meat, and I can't cook it. I've had some success butterflying it, pounding it flat with a tenderizer, breading it, and then frying it in a pan, but that was more work than I like.)

Good God, where was I? Oh, right: this is not that recipe.

What I have is a crockpot. Here's what I threw in it:

• 1 package boneless, skinless chicken thighs (mine was 1.29 lb.)
• 1 package baby carrots (1 lb. - minus a couple I held back, because the little guy likes to nibble on carrots)
• ~1/4 to 1/2 cup green olives stuffed with garlic cloves, from the olive bar at Wegman's. (I don't know exactly how many were in there - I got a whole pint-ish-sized tub of them originally, but we've been eating them straight all week. Which I knew would happen, which is why I bought more than I needed.)
• 1 14-oz. can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
• ~ 1 tbsp. minced garlic (I scraped out the last of what was in my jar. It might have been less than a tbsp.)
• 1 tbsp. ras el hanout (see earlier post)
  
• ~ 1 tbsp. lemon juice (I didn't measure that either; I squeezed it straight into the crockpot.)
• 1 32-oz. box chicken broth (I used the Swanson's Natural Goodness kind; one of my cooking magazines recommended it as the best one, for lower-fat-and-salt reasons. I think canned soups are one of the french fry type offenders, so, ok.)

I put this in the crockpot in the morning, turned it on low, and let it go all day, until dinnertime. I didn't chop anything up. I figured the crockpot would tenderize it (and it did). I'd never actually crockpotted chicken thighs before, but they cook better than breasts in every other way I've tried. And it worked out; they fell apart very easily, without being that gross powdery dry texture I've somehow managed to give chicken breasts when I cook them in liquid.

The olives lost their characteristic saltiness after hours in the pot. I don't really know anything about olives, besides that they're salty. But this seems to suggest that one should choose olives that are still going to taste good when their salt is gone. I have no idea how you would tell, though. I seem to have lucked out, in that these olives were not offensive. They might even have been good, but it's hard to tell when you're surprised by the total re-definition of the food. I don't know if maybe there's some other variety that would really taste spectacular in this situation.

Anyway, the tagine was really good. It was sort of light, and the broth was nice - just spiced enough to taste interesting, but not overpowering. I think it would be a really good chicken soup analogue, when sick.

It reminded Jerry of medieval food (that's a compliment); he says these spices were often used back then. And even the Little Dude, who had thus far refused to eat chicken in non-nugget form, consented to eat this. He started picking out the chicken pieces after a few mouthfuls, but nonetheless: he did eat some chicken!

We had a loaf of bakery bread (rosemary-salt-olive oil, I think), and dunked pieces into the broth. I tell you, that was to die for.