Salad Dressing Marinated Chicken Tagine-ish Style

You know those days when you come home and you need to make dinner and you have no idea where to start?  This dish started from one of these experiences.  I started to take mental stock of what I had and decided I wanted to some sort of chicken dish to go with some baked potatoes and asparagus.  I also was thinking about how much I like Moroccan Tagine cooked food.  So this is my version of tagine cooking, but without a tagine. 

They look like this:

I don't actually own one.  

But that's ok.  I use a Korean stone pot.  If you don't have one of those, that's okay too.  You can use a ceramic or glass baking dish with tin foil.

I think salad dressing is an amazing invention.  Not only is it good for salads (obviously), but also good for dipping veggies into or chips even.  I use Italian dressing when I make potato salad and it is divine!  I also LOVE to use it as a marinade for poultry, beef and even seafood.  I know, right?!  If you don't have any salad dressing at home, feel free to grab some oil and vinegar and maybe even some mayo or sour cream.

Here are the culprits:
2-4 chicken thighs OR 1-2 chicken breasts
Italian Salad Dressing
Cesar Salad Dressing
fresh crushed garlic
seasoning salt
black pepper
dried herbs
lemon

Normally, I like to use breast meat, but I happened to have thigh meat.  This method is really great for white meat because sometimes it tends to be dry.  I know...not a surprise.  But you can use either or a combo of both white and dark meat.  You can also use drumsticks or bone in chicken pieces.  I just happen to like boneless chicken so that's what I use.

I  started by cutting my chicken pieces into chunks like this:

In a different bowl, I add about a quarter cup of Italian salad dressing and a quarter cup of Cesar salad dressing.  If you don't have Italian dressing, you can use some pickle juice and some olive oil.  Yes, your read that right.  Pickle juice and olive oil.  Trust me when I say you can't mess this up. 

If you don't have Cesar dressing, ranch works or even some mayo or sour cream.  You can also just opt to use the Italian dressing ONLY if you wanted too!  Decisions, decisions.

To the salad dressings, I added a heaping tablespoon of fresh crushed garlic.  If you don't have fresh, you can use garlic powder.  Be careful about using garlic SALT.  Garlic salt will make this dish too salty.

 

I also added seasoning salt and black pepper and some dried herbs.  I happened to have herbs de provence mix which is just a fancy way to say I used savory, marjoram, rosemary and thyme and oregano.  Feel free to use whatever herbs you have on hand.

Give your marinade a nice mix up.

Coat your chicken pieces in the marinade.  You don't need a lot of marinade.  The idea is to coat not soak the chicken in it.  In tagine cooking, the cone shaped lid traps the steam and sends it back down into the base so you will end up with a nice, rich broth.  So don't worry about not having a lot of marinade left in the bottom.

 

As I mentioned before, I don't actually own a tagine.  So I use my Korean stone pot.  Koreans use these for making soybean paste stews.  You can check out my LA version of Army

Base Soybean stew by clicking here.  

Add all your marinade coated chicken into your stone pot.  If you don't have one, you can use a small oven proof baking dish with a lid or  just cover with foil.  Easy!

I take one lemon and give it a rinse because I use the rind in this dish.  Thinly slice your lemon.  I used half this lemon, but you can use the entire lemon if you prefer.

I layer the thinly sliced lemons on top of my chicken...

 

and cover with the lid.

Ready to go in the oven!

I should mention that you can add green olives, sliced almonds and dried apricots to this and it is amazing.  The Indian dood I live with might possibly have a heart attack if I did that so I didn't for this meal.  But I highly recommend that you sneak them in. 

Bake at 400 for 40 minutes.  I even threw in some potatoes to bake at the same time.  See what a multi-tasker I am?

This smells divine.  

See what I mean about all the steam being pushed back down to create a nice lemony broth? 

I served the chicken with braised asparagus and baked potatoes.  You can also serve with rice, noodles, over salad... Use the broth to dip bread into, or spoon some over your chicken.

You can even save the liquid for soups, for cooking rice in, cooking veggies in.  Freeze in a container or freeze in an ice cube try for little blocks of flavor.