Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

Over the years, we've all tried many chicken and rice dishes -- one of the most commonly voted favorite meals for the most people imaginable.  It's hard to go wrong when the extent of the simplest form of chicken and rice might be nothing more than spraying a baking pan with non-stick, stirring some cream of mushroom soup and water into the pan, mix with rice, then dropping your preferred portions of chicken over the top and setting in the oven.  If the rice seems to be getting baked too quickly, add some water or aluminum foil over the top.  Serve with veggies and the dish is an easy no-brainer.  Using the slow cooker for the Chicken with Saffron Rice allows some benefits as well.

One of the obvious advantages of slow cooking is the idea that you can begin the process early in the day and for the most part expect the dish to be done when you want it.  The other nice advantage of the slow cooker, though, is its ability to slowly mix flavors and its ability to more deeply cook meats. The intention of this recipe was to exhibit a couple of flavor profiles.  One of them is a nice onion mixture, eventually layered over the chicken pieces, consisting of sautéed yellow onion, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper.  The second is supposed to be the saffron mixture, nothing more than a 'large pinch' of saffron to soaked in 1/2 cup of white wine.

Since the text kitchen is mine, I went ahead and skipped this step, knowing a couple of things from the past: saffron is decidedly an interesting spice, both in flavor and in texture, but it has a kind of hay-like pungency that I haven't had a lot of success with; combined with white wine really added no benefit to my dish and I knew that there were other flavor centers to be added, including on the chicken itself.  As with most slow cooker meat recipes, this one also called for browning the meat before it goes in the slow cooker; for all of its advantages, the slow cooker, for the most part, is not made to brown, but made instead usually to soak or moisten.  I not only like to give the skins of meat a very solid sear, but I also added onto the skin a rotisserie spice, strong enough to hold up against three hours of soaking in among rice and water. I used a whole chicken, cut in pieces, placing the large breast pieces down first, the the thighs and drumsticks.  I then placed the onion mixture over than, 4 cups worth of chicken broth, then mixed in at least 2 cups of long grain white rice. I've

noticed that when the rice is first mixed in, it never looks like it will be enough portions to serve, but am almost always surprised by the amount of fluff that it produces at the end.  This time was no exception.  With 15 minutes left in the 3 hour cooking time, the recipe calls for adding one last texture, 2 large jarred roasted pimiento peppers, then to let that essentially steam for a final 15 minutes.  As I was looking through the deli section of the grocery store for this product, I came across what was called a roasted red pepper bruschetta spread that I thought would work nicely, and it did.  As a roasted product, most of the flavors of the peppers had calmed and you are left with subtle hints of soft red peppers and a lot of olive oil, which happens to add a nice moisture over the top of the somewhat dried white rice.

Over the top of this very densely textured and flavored rice mixture, I added a few stalks of simple cooked asparagus. The chicken was so soft the bones had a hard time staying inside the skin.  The rice had a comfort food quality that can only come from a slow cooking process.