Weeknight Cooking:
Arroz Con Pollo

Traditionally conceived Paella (Spanish rice) dishes can be intimidating to consider for any weeknight cooking option.  Ingredients like rabbit, an option of snails, broad/fava beans and bomba rice all sound very enticing but hard to come by.  Fortunately there are many other options available; thought of broadly, the arroz con pollo recipe, for example, is really just a fine name for a chicken and rice dish

splashed with some colorful vegetables and laced with strands of saffron.  Spanish rice dishes fall into categories based on how much of the rice is intended to be soaked up, so that an 'arroz secos' is a dish that is cooked in a very shallow pan until quite dry; baked dishes are called 'arroz al horno' and maintain more of stew like quality.  Creamy rice, 'arroz en coldoso' is cooked in a deeper pan and comes out more as a sauce.  The key quality to the Arroz Con Pollo, I found, was to properly reduce the initial highly brothy texture to something closer to the Paella stew like form.  As long as the heat is a slight simmer at medium low, the broth cooks off without overcooking the chicken or drying the rice.

Based on the advice of the recipe, you can marinade chicken thighs first if you like, to add flavor in the cooking process, but I skipped the marinade and seasoned a package of boneless thighs with the only southwestern style seasoning that we had, a sort of Mexican combination that resembles somewhat the Spanish origin of these dishes.  Cook the thighs to close to done on both sides; meanwhile prepare four cups of chicken broth sprinkled with some threads of saffron for added depth.

Add to the chicken fat in the pan chopped red onion, chopped bell pepper, cook for a minute, then add four chopped plum tomatoes.  Sprinkle on some cumin, two bay leaves, two cups of chosen rice (I chose a

medley grain option for texture) until the rice soaks up the liquid in the pan; add to that the chicken broth and the mostly cooked chicken pieces, raise the heat to boil, then back down to simmer for around 20 minutes, or until most of the visible liquid in the pan has been soaked.  Add salt along the way to make sure that the broth and rice don't bring the dish down too dull.  Once you extract the bay leaves after 20 minutes, let the dish sit, what you have is not only a very visually appealing rice dish, but an entirely different and more vibrant take on the standard rice and chicken baked dishes (also usually quite good).  Other vegetables could easily be swapped out for the bell pepper, and I

considered for a moment even adding some finely diced portions of scrambled eggs, which I thought might compliment the rice nicely as it so often does in more Asian dishes.