Chicken Thingie!

I finally got around to trying to replicate that chicken thingie at Nora’s in Las Vegas. (Sis, you really have to check that place out.) Not an exact replica, since I didn’t know how much my son would appreciate an orange sauce on his chicken. He doesn’t do “sweet” with dinner, not at all, and he’s sometimes resistant to “sour,” too. What kind of kid doesn’t like sweet and sour pork? My kid. But I digress.

So the challenge was to create perfectly cooked chicken thighs — tender meat, crispy and savory skin — with some sort of rich, flavorful sauce. Don’t get hung up on details here. Follow the general principles, and you can make a delicious Chicken Thingie, too.

0. Preheat your oven to 350F.

1. Put a few tablespoonfuls of olive oil into a nonstick pan and turn the heat up to high.

2. Cut a couple of short slits into the skin of each thigh. If you don’t do that, the skin will shrink to a postage stamp when you fry it, and your chicken thighs will look like Divine in a string bikini.

3. Put the thighs skin-side-down into the hot olive oil and fry the crap out of them. I suspect I cooked them on high for 4 to 5 minutes, but who knows, who cares? You can peek under them every so often to see how they’re coming along. You want the skin to be golden and crispy.

4. Meanwhile, sprinkle the topside of each thigh with salle alla erbe delle marlunghe. What do you mean, you don’t have any salle alla erbe delle marlunghe? Fine! Sprinkle with black pepper and kosher salt.

5. Flip thighs and cook the other side until crispy, too. Sprinkle the topsides with salt and pepper.

6. Transfer the thighs to a casserole dish and place in a 350F oven. Bake for 25 minutes. Meanwhile, work on your pan sauce . . .

7. Pour out most of the oil into a bowl. You might want to use a bit of this in a moment. Chop half an onion fine, dice a few cloves of garlic. Throw the onion into the frying pan, which should have some nice fond stuck to the nonstick surface. As the onions cook, they will partially deglaze the fond, but you’ll get back to that in a moment. Once the onions have turned clear, add the garlic. Use additional oil as necessary. Don’t let the garlic turn brown — it’ll get bitter. So once you’ve added the garlic, you only want to keep frying the mixture for about another minute or two.

8. Deglaze with liquid of choice. I used about 4 parts pinot noir, 1 part Vietnamese fish sauce. Seriously — fish sauce! It adds lots of flavor to the sauce. I also put a little chicken stock into the sauce since I had some in the fridge. And when I took my thighs out of the oven, I poured the drippings into the sauce too. It’s all cool when it comes to complexity.

Note that if I really wanted to imitate the dish at Nora’s, I would have added some freshly squeezed orange juice to build my sauce.

9. Meanwhile, I’m cooking down the sauce and adding various spices. I used a good pinch of red pepper flakes, some coriander, and a pinch of Spanish smoked paprika.

10. Once the chicken is done and the sauce has reduced (you want to see maybe 1/4 cup of liquid in the pan), start adding butter to the sauce, no more than one tablespoonful at a time. Less is better. Stir after each addition. This will thicken the sauce and make it even richer in taste.

11. Don’t do what I did (pour the sauce over the chicken, thus softening the crispy skin). Pour the sauce on the plate, put the chicken on top. Decorate with Green Stuff of Choice — chopped parsley or cilantro, whatever. Totally optional.

12. Fress up! Serve with a nice pilaf and freshly steamed vegies. Not that I did, but that’s what I would have done, if I had my druthers.

D.