Cooking Experiment: Cranberry Tomato Chicken

Random Inspiration

So I was inspired to try something new recently. I was just walking around Wegman's and buying juice, when it dawned on me: Cranberry juice.

I grabbed a bottle and decided that I would use it for cooking later. A while ago, I was fascinated by a recipe that dictated the use of orange juice to flavor zucchini slices cooking in a pan.

Cut to now- where I'm in my kitchen and my girlfriend, Sarah, is asking me, "What do you want to do for dinner?" I decided then and there- I'm trying out my new idea.

The Process

Admittedly, I had no recipe. So I was just going to wing it as best as I could to make it taste not so horrible. All I had was a couple of guiding goals:

• put the taste of Cranberry into the chicken
• don't make it too sweet or tart

I realized also while writing this, I didn't exactly know what all of the cooking terminology was for the methods I had used. So I had to look it up!
I began by unconventionally quick braising the chicken in water to get it just to whiten slightly (without searing). Then emptied the pan prepared the Cranberry juice that I would eventually poach the chicken in. The amounts of each specific liquid used each time was purely arbitrary, but it was enough to cover the entire bottom of the pan without reducing to gunk during the cooking process. The idea was that I wanted to weaken the chicken flavor, and put in the Cranberry juice flavor. Heat is on very low, so I had time to figure out what to do next before putting the chicken back in.

I went ahead to put in some corn starch (in retrospect, it wasn't enough) to try and thicken the juice a little bit. Then I wanted to put in something fruity and flavorful that could go with the sweet Cranberry. So I chose something that we had lying around: Sweet Cherry Tomatoes. Chopped some up, and put them in the pan. If I could have a re-do button, I would have put in one less tomato.

After it sat in the pan for what seemed like an appropriate (arbitrarily determined timeframe of course), I put the chicken in. It poached for a while, until I felt like the insides were all cooked. At once point, I added some sugar, because I needed a way to hide the acidity of the sauce. I wasn't sure how to do this, but good old Google was kind enough to lend me the information.

The Results

Here's what they looked like in their "sauce" (if you could even call it a sauce):

Here's what it looked like with the rice and corn we had with it (corn was frozen and microwaved, rice was dry and rice-cooked in a rice cooker):


Post Analysis

Aside from the few unknowns (rather big ones like "how the heck is this going to taste?" and "what the heck am I doing?"), and the slight panic at reducing acidity, the dish itself came out very well.

• it came out looking very pretty; all soft, tender white chicken clearly covered with a pink~ish sauce
• the chicken was moist and cooked all the way through
• the chicken did indeed have a Cranberry juice taste
• amazingly, it was not too sweet, nor was the flavor lacking

My girlfriend was teasing me about not finishing it if it tasted horrible. To my surprised- she ended up eating the whole thing. I was quite proud of this experiment.