Oven chicken thighs with veggies and honey hot sauce

 

Oven chicken with mushrooms, onions, garlic, and a chili-Worcestershire-soy-honey-vinegar sauce, served with couscous. I like couscous because it takes 3 minutes to make and is good at soaking up delicious sauce.

 

I can't actually give a recipe for this, but I can tell you what I did.

Chopped an onion and started sweating it over medium heat, with salt. I used my cast iron chicken fryer, which is deeper than a skillet. A Dutch oven would clearly work, also.

Peeled and chopped two cloves of garlic and added to the pot.

Made a marinade/sauce of red wine vinegar, honey, red chili sauce (the chunky kind, Chinese), Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce. I kind of did it by glugs and spoons and taste.* For four boneless, skinless chicken thighs, I used about 2 tablespoons of the chili sauce, but be careful -- you can add but you can't remove! The goal is to have enough of the combined ingredients to generously coat the chicken pieces, and more is clearly better. So it's fine to add and taste and add and taste.

Preheated the oven to 425. 

Soaked the four chicken thighs in this sauce for about 15 minutes while I slowly sweated the vegetables on medium low heat:

To the onion/garlic, I added about two cups of sliced "baby bella" (aka cremini) mushrooms and some chopped up roasted red pepper, which was in a jar in my pantry; I used about half the jar. It would probably be one pepper if you roasted one from scratch. 

I arranged the four chicken thighs on top of the vegetables and poured all the sauce over the whole thing. 

Put it in the oven to cook for half an hour, turning the thighs over after 15 minutes.

After checking that the chicken was done, I made couscous. It's 1-1/2 cups liquid -- water or broth -- to 1 cup couscous. Bring it to a boil, turn off the heat and slap a lid on it. I like to add a generous blob of butter, especially when I use water instead of broth, but that's up to you.

Serve the chicken and veggies over the couscous. That's it. 

Clearly, you could add any vegetables that you want to, and even add something like cashews or other nuts; olives might be good, too. You could add tomato paste or barbecue sauce or lemon juice to the sauce, as the mood strikes you.

 *I made another batch of this, measuring this time:

1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce

1/4 cup soy sauce

2 Tablespoons chili garlic sauce (less if you don't like spicy)

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

1/2 cup honey, or to taste (use less if you are using balsamic vinegar, for example)

I think this would also be a good dipping sauce for things like fried shrimp. Remember that when it is cooked with the chicken and veggies, it gets "diluted" with their juices, so it will be stronger as a stand-alone sauce. Might want less chili sauce in it, for example.