Have you been wishing for a speedy tasty weeknight chicken idea? I have just the recipe for you. It's Arroz con Pollo, from Coco Morante's Essential Instant Pot Cookbook. (That's an affiliate link, meaning Amazon will pay me a few cents if you click through and wind up buying something.)
First, pile the following items into your food processor and turn them into green and pungent puree: a quartered onion, a seeded red bell pepper cut in strips, 8 cloves of garlic, a bunch of cilantro including the stems, 1/4 c. pimiento-stuffed green olives, 1 T. capers, 2 t. kosher salt, 1 t. black pepper, 1 t. dried oregano, and 1/2 c. olive oil. This is your sofrito.
Fire up your Instant Pot in sauté mode and add a tablespoonful of olive oil. When it shimmers, measure out a half-cup of your sofrito. (Or maybe more. It's such a yummy mix of flavors.) Stir it around in the hot fat for about 5 minutes to tone down the ferocity of the raw onion. Next you'll chuck in more green olives (1/4 c., sliced), more capers (1 T.), and 1.5 lb. boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-inch pieces. Toss them around in the sofrito. Flatten the chicken into an even-ish layer and pour 1.5 c. white rice on top, spreading it out more or less evenly.
Now you'll stir together 1 c. chicken broth and another cup of tomato sauce. Add them to the pot, and make sure all of your grains of rice are bathed in liquid. Check for wayward grains, perhaps straggling along up the sides of the pot, because surprise mouthfuls of crunchy rice will make this delightful dish much sadder.
You're almost there: seal 'er up, and switch the cooking mode to Poultry. Give it 10 minutes at high pressure and 10 minutes of natural release. Serve it forth with more cilantro on top, and save some for me.
The nicest thing about this recipe is that it makes a bunch of sofrito, so you can freeze it in recipe-sized portions. Then you have hardly any work to do: slice your chicken roughly along with your olives and you're practically done. It's less than 15 minutes of hands-on time.
Elwood made this recipe last month and I practically burst into song at the dinner table when I tasted it. When I made it again a week later, I thought I'd put the rice on the bottom and the chicken on top -- that way (it seemed to me) the rice would have to be coated in liquid. It was a disaster, though -- a woeful mix of mushy and crunchy. Even the thought of that dish is causing me to make sad disgusted faces as I type. But! Fear not! Follow the recipe and all should be well. Tell me if you try it!
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