On Chicken

From the kitchen of a vegetarian!

Happy Friday! This is the weekly recipe post for paid subscribers, and I make it once a week. On Tuesday, all readers will receive an essay on travel, which has been on my mind since we got back from Italy. There is a hard stop ahead, which sucks, but hey: it’s this or endless ads on a website, so here we are.

I want to first say that I fully appreciate the irony of getting a weekly recipe from a vegetarian and realizing that it is a meat-focused recipe. I will continue digging myself into this hole and tell you, in fact, that this recipe is one of my most-cooked dinners. *sits back and waits for blowback*

The reason I started making these chicken skillets so frequently for dinner is kind of a boring one: it is so, so, stupidly easy. You literally throw things in a cast iron skillet and call it a day. Ta-dah! The very best part about it, in my vegetarian and also-slightly-OCD opinion is that you don’t have to handle, cut, or touch chicken in any way. I have truly become an expert in getting the thighs from the packaging to the pan without coming in contact with any gross juices.

Like most savory recipes I develop, I’ve made this several dozen times at this point, and it’s different every time. To me, that’s the sign of a recipe worth sharing: it can be adapted in countless ways to fit different diets, palates, and pantries. It can be the thing you cook to clean out your fridge. It can be made over and over and changed every time you make it. That’s this chicken skillet.

So here are the rules (which I, of course, encourage you to break):

1. Use bone-in, skin-on thighs. The skin gets crispy, and the bones help keep the moisture in the meat. Plus, you can use the bones to make stock afterwards!

2. Spice aggressively. Salt and black pepper are essentials, but I love using a wild fennel and rosemary blend on some skillets; garam masala on others; and a schwarma spice blend on others.

3. Plan a starch to soak up the gravy. The best part of making this recipe is using a hunk of sourdough bread (or roasted potato or garlic naan) to scrape up the gravy left behind in the pan. Don’t sleep on it.

4. Get wild with your veggie combos! As the resident vegetarian, this is what I live for. For what it’s worth, everything cooks together in our house. I don’t get too picky about having my veggies touch meat, and to be frank, there’s little that compares to vegetables cooked in chicken fat. I love mixing it up, and I’ve done just about every combination under the sun: carrots, leeks, onions, scallions, potatoes, raisins, celery (with the leaves!), parsnips, fennel, brussels sprouts, etc, etc, etc!

Chicken Skillet

This recipe = not the version written below. There’s peas! And breadcrumbs! And fingerling potatoes!