Season your chicken with a sweet and tangy marinade, then let the oven do all the work! A low effort, high reward meal prep recipe that you should have in your rotation.

Time: 3/5
Another one and done in an hour.

Effort: 3/5
Elbow grease optional, and almost no cleanup.

High on Thighs

My vacation has ended, and with it the culinary experimentation. It’s time to prepare for going back to the office, and that means whipping up another batch of good old chicken and rice for some solid mid-day nutrition all week.

I’ve come back to the sweet and savoury flavour profile many times in the course of previous meal preps. From the Gochujang Hot Honey Chicken, to the Honey Miso Chicken and Salmon recipes, to the Chicken and Mackerel Teriyakis.

That’s because it’s a reliable way of making a protein taste reasonably good for minimal effort, and with most home cooking I believe that it’s about min-maxing the effort to reward ratio rather than aiming for the absolute best results.

Mustard gives the chicken a nice tang and sharpness, while the honey mellows it out. Roasting the thighs in a foil and parchment lined sheet pan obviates the need for cleanup. It’s a quick and efficient solution. I serve it with rice because the rice cooker is another fire-and-forget appliance, but nothing stops you from having this with any other carb (it would be lovely with a pasta salad, for example).

There isn’t much more to say about this recipe, other than the fact that it’s one more reliable workhorse chicken and rice meal prep recipe to add to the rotation. Give it a go, and let me know if you like it!

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 0

Dramatis Personae

Served 6.

1kg chicken thighs, boneless and skin-on

Still my meal prep protein of choice. One of meats with a lower carbon footprint, roasted chicken skin tastes great, and no bones to take up space and heat in the oven.

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

Or thereabouts. The actual measurement I used was “dollops until it looks right”, but that’s too unprofessional for a big boy cooking blog so 2 tablespoons is my best guess.

2 tablespoons honey

More than the mustard, but not too much. Sugar helps with getting delicious brown, caramel flavours, but too much and the food will burn easily. Substitute with sugar or maple syrup, but the flavour would be a bit different.

1 teaspoon garlic paste

A tiny bit brings out a lot of savouriness. I keep some around for curry, as well as marinating meats. Garlic powder isn’t as bright, but if you have to substitute with it you might want to triple the amount.

Half teaspoon dried mixed herbs

Not sure it did anything, to be honest. There’s plenty of pretty robust flavours going on already. But it’s been in my pantry since forever and I guess it wouldn’t hurt.

Salt and pepper to taste.

I like about 1 teaspoon of salt. This is about 0.6% salt by weight for the chicken, which is about where I like it. Experiment and find out what you prefer yourself.

Vegetables

Always eat your veggies! I had 1.5 heads of small cabbages (about 900g), and 2.5 large carrots (about 500g). Don’t remember why I had so many bits and bobs, but they’re all getting stir fried together with a few cloves of garlic and covered in oyster sauce.

Executive summary

1. Mix marinade ingredients with chicken thighs and refrigerate overnight.
2. The next day, begin by starting the rice cooker.
3. Preheat oven to 200C/400F. Line a baking sheet with aluminium foil and parchment paper.
4. Roast chicken for 30 minutes, skin side up.
5. In the meantime, prepare and cook the vegetables.
6. Assemble and serve.

Play by Play

Last things first. The chicken already comes in a ziploc bag, so I do the marinating right inside of it.

Cook day. The chicken takes half an hour, so I give it a head start. The oven preheats while I lay it out in the baking sheet, then in it goes.

That leaves my hands free to chop the vegetables. Garlic and carrots kept separately, because I like my carrots on the soft side so they go in first.

Once the carrots wilt a bit, there’s more space in the wok to stir in the cabbage. I can’t honestly call this a stir fry though – I’m just making the vegetables not-raw by applying heat. The wok is just the biggest cooking vessel I have.

Ah, oyster sauce. The lazy home cook’s shortcut to flavour. It’s not a crime to make your vegetables taste good!

Beautifully browned, and the honey helps get a bit of char on the chicken. You may be able to see that my oven is hotter on the right. In the future, I might rotate the tray to get more even heat.

Juicy flesh, well browned skin, no bones to get in the way of eating. The drippings at the bottom of the roasting pan tastes great when drizzled onto rice, but whether or not you do that is between you and your cardiologist (;

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