Chicken sofrito (p. 190)

The canonical chicken recipe from Jerusalem is the casserole with rice and cardamom and spices.  This is the one with the NYT video, the Epicurious post, and so on.  You mention this book, and people start extolling the virtues of the chicken and rice casserole.

So tonight, I made a different one-pot chicken meal from Jerusalem, the chicken sofrito.

What is interesting to me is that this is a dinner lots of us have had.  It's chicken with 40 cloves of garlic.  I first had it in my 20s (I didn't eat meat from 1992 to 2000), and I've brought it to potlucks and eaten it in other people's houses.  I think everyone has their little tricks for it: you can play around with the cooking liquid (my preference is unfermented apple cider), and the seasoning (I like cinnamon), and if you choose to add veggies (sometimes spinach or chard).  And you can use different starches as well (my preference is the easy-peasy oven-cooked polenta by Paula Wolfert, which takes 1.5 hrs to cook, but so does chicken with 40 cloves).

What do we get in Jerusalem?

• Brown the chicken parts first?  Yes!
• Cooking liquid? Lemon juice.
• Seasoning?  Paprika and turmeric.  Also, a trivial amount of irrelevant sugar.
• Other veggies?  A quartered onion.
• Funny garlic cooking trick?  Deep fry it!
• Starch?  Tater tots (OK, "cubed potatoes") that you deep fry and then toss into the chicken stew an hour into the cooking process.

It's exactly as tasty as you think it would be.  But exotic?  No, not especially.  It might be enhanced with the pomegranate seeds that wind up in so many other Jerusalem recipes.  Certainly a fine dinner for a frigid February Sunday.