Roasted Chicken with Creamy Chipotle Sauce
Nothing destresses me more that cooking a good meal. One of my friends always questioned how I can have the energy to make a full meal after working all day. I honestly don't know where the energy comes from sometimes. Maybe my hunger gives me the adrenaline to feed myself...
Anyways, this week was one of those weeks when I crave to be in the kitchen and cook up a storm to forget everything that was happening. Work is definitely picking up as the academic year is fast approaching. My school work for this quarter is getting heavier, especially today when I spent FIVE hours taking a finance midterm! I'm also patiently waiting for a cut I got last weekend to heal. It’s super irritating and weird looking (don’t worry, I’ve been asking my roommate who’s a nurse to look at it). Then my laptop crashed last night!! Quite the cherry on top!
While all of this happening, I’ve been consoling myself by dreaming up delicious meals. Everyone does that, right? One of the meals I was imagining was this roasted chicken thigh with a creamy, chipotle sauce with some potatoes and veggies. Ta-da, I made it tonight! And you can easily make it tomorrow! Or whenever.
The story behind this not-actually-very-imaginative meal was from two recent-ish meals. I had really good roasted chicken last weekend and I’ve been craving it since then. I had a really good chipotle cream sauce with fish tacos at the beach earlier this month and I’ve been craving it since then. Since roasted chicken can be pretty easy to pair with any sauce, I thought that I could combine the two. And what a great marriage it is!
I’ll start with the recipe for the creamy chipotle sauce. My boyfriend’s sister actually made this and she kind of threw everything together and it turned out delicious. You can really use this sauce for a lot of dishes. It’d be good as a spread on a sandwich, with tacos, roasted chicken or beef, dipping sauce for veggies, etc.. To prove that it’s versatile, I made a whole mason jar of it tonight.
Creamy Chipotle Sauce
Note that this makes two cups of sauce. Trust me, you’ll want to have plenty leftover to keep in the fridge. If not, just adjust the quantity to make the amount that you need.
1 cup sour cream
1 cup plain Greek yogurt
2-3 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce and some of the sauce
Juice of ½ lemon
1 garlic clove
⅛ tsp cumin
¼ cup cilantro, roughly chopped
Salt
Process everything together in a food processor or blend in a blender. You can really adjust any of the ingredients to fit your palette.
Now, the roasted chicken. One of the many dishes you could have the delicious sauce with.
Roasted Chicken with Fingerling Potatoes and Asparagus
I’m purposely leaving out the ingredient measurement so you could scale this recipe to the number of servings you want. The great thing about this meal is that all of it can be baked in the oven at the same time.
Ingredients:
Chicken thighs, bone-in with skin
Fingerling potatoes
Asparagus
Salt
Pepper
Paprika
Olive oil
Slices of lemon
Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Place chicken thighs on a baking sheet. Drizzle the thighs with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
In a bowl, toss the potatoes with olive oil, salt, pepper, and paprika. If you have an herb infused oil on hand, you can use that, too. You can also add dried rosemary, thyme, basil, garlic powder, onion powder, or whatever fancies you. Put the potatoes on a baking sheet.
For two servings, I used 4 thighs and about ½ lb of potatoes. I roasted both of them on the same baking sheet.
Roast the chicken and potatoes for 30 minutes. Add a lemon slice to each thigh for the last 15 minutes.
Alternatively, you can pan fry your chicken until the skin is golden brown and crispy and finish cooking it in the oven for about 15 minutes.
On a separate baking sheet, spread your asparagus on it in a single layer. Drizzle olive oil over it and season with salt and pepper. Bake for 15 minutes at 400. I put mine in for the last 15 minutes of the chicken and potato roasting.
Serve with the creamy chipotle sauce for some more great flavoring.