Chicken thighs again!

Next up is one of my favourite cookbooks, Alton Brown's 'I'm only here for the food':

It's not just a book of recipes - in fact, I take it back, it isn't a book of recipes at all. It's a cookbook: it's a book which tells you how to cook. It's got a wonderful introduction in which Alton describes his approach to writing about cooking. He contrasts giving someone directions to your house with giving them a map: in the first case, they might arrive safely, but they wouldn't know what to do if a tree had fallen in the road and they couldn't follow the directions any more.

Anyway, there were lots of recipes to try. As a teaser, we made 'Scampi 2.0', a quick fried shrimp recipe with roma tomatoes and persillade added at the last moment (I like the description of persillade on that Wikipedia page: 'when it is added at the end of cooking or as a garnish, it provides a garlicky jolt'):

But the main recipe we did was 'Chicken in Garlic and Shallots':

The principle behind this recipe is that you bake chicken thighs with lots of olive oil, garlic (ten cloves), shallots (ten shallots), fresh parsley and thyme. The baked garlic and shallot are nice and mild, so he recommends adding them to mashed potatoes, which is what we did.

Start, as usual, with one baby and one mother:

Then take some seasoned chicken thighs:

Brown them, add garlic, shallots, and herbs, and you have a beautiful pan ready for the oven:

Well, it looks beautiful now. But at the time, I was very annoyed, because once again the chicken thigh skins stuck to the pan as I was browning them. This happened to me once before, when I was doing Thomas Keller's chicken thighs. I still don't know what the explanation is, but I think it might have something to do with trying to brown the thighs in oil alone (rather than with a little butter). Anyway, when the thighs came out, I separated out the pan juices, reserving the scented oil for another time and keeping the chicken jus for this dish:

As I said earlier, the mashed potatoes have garlic stirred into them. We also had the ubiquitous broccoli:

Verdict: good, but not spectacular. I blame myself for not browning the thighs properly. And Katherine didn't really like the shallots. Other than that, a great success!

Postscript: we also did Alton Brown's Melanzane alla Parmigiana, which was absolutely delicious. So out of the three dishes we did from the book, two were excellent, and one was good. Not a bad hit rate. But what else would you expect from good old Alton?