Overnight chicken in a pot has become the savior of our weeknight cooking

Overnight chicken in a pot has become the savior of our weeknight cooking
overnight poached chicken, weeknight recipes, easy chicken recipes, overnight recipes, roast chicken, baked chicken, voraciously
/ @dongonews9123
Overview Ingredients Steps Overview It’s been a couple years now since at-home sous-vide has come into vogue. And for good reason: Who doesn’t want perfectly cooked food that you needn’t watch over every moment? You too can now emulate your favorite restaurant chef! But as soon as the news of those “affordable” circulators and, more recently, sous-vide sticks hit the market - Control with an app! You needn’t even be home to get dinner on! - the hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up. Why? Because home cooks are not restaurant chefs, and were never meant to be. We have neither investors nor line cooks, dishwashers nor endless counter space. The batterie of the home cook is smaller and more flexible, and it’s put into use with economy and know-how. Still, I’m not immune to the siren song of new culinary toys, especially ones that promise low-maintenance paths to dinner. As busy parents of toddler twins, my chef husband and I have struggled to cook since our kids were born. Despite plenty of kitchen skills between us, we work opposite schedules: he mostly nights, me mostly days. We’re often ships passing in the night. Trying to still a wriggling kid who’s trying to reach into a pot of boiling water (while we settle for pasta, yet again) hardly fulfills my vision of work/life balance. Last year, in the doldrums (and sticker shock) over our expanding takeout habit, I found myself begrudgingly researching sous-vide equipment, sniffing for the silver bullet solution to our woes: We still want to cook and eat well, not just quickly. I considered asking for a sous-vide stick as a gift, then immediately started backpedaling. Our kitchen drawers were already cluttered, I have a gut aversion to cooking in (and throwing away) all that plastic, and finally, money. What else could we do with those extra bucks (at home sous-vide sticks start around $45 and “water ovens” can cost upwards of $1,000): extra hours from the babysitter, a massage, maybe even part of a vacation? I tucked the sous-vide idea away and decided to muddle through. It was my husband, often still awake when I’m already sacked out, who struck on an idea one night. He came home from work, wiped. We had a chicken in the fridge that I’d been promising to roast, but hadn’t gotten around to. The fridge was mostly empty, and we had no dinners planned for the week. With no energy to sit up while the bird roasted, he cranked the oven high, seasoned the chicken aggressively, put it in a heavy lidded pot, and stuck it in the oven for a half hour to start it browning. When the kitchen began to fill with the scent of rendering fat, he added water to come up the bird a little more than halfway, clapped the pot’s top on, turned the oven down to 200 degrees, and went to bed. The next morning, we unlidded the thing: The chicken was straw gold on top, with an almost creamily luscious broth surrounding it in. The meat pulled off the bone at the barest pull from a fork. We used the liquid as the base for