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Chicken and Bacon Casserole

Favourite Food • Food • Rachel's Recipes • Recipes

 Serves 4-8

This is simple comfort food, just how it should be. If you like your casserole enough, serve the chicken straight from this in the centre of the table

  • You could toss the chicken pieces in flour seasoned with a little salt and pepper, before you brown them. Don’t burn them.
  • You could thicken the juices with some roux at the very end, and then pour back on the chicken and vegetables.

Ingredients

  • 450g (1lb) piece of streaky bacon cut into 2cm chunks
  • 4 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 chicken, jointed into 8 pieces
  • 4 med carrots, peeled and cut into 4cm chunks, or 12 baby carrots, scrubbed and left whole
  • 10 baby onions, peeled (or 4 med onions, peeled and halved), red onions are good too
  • 6-8 garlic cloves, peeled
  • 400ml (3/4 pint) chicken stock or failing that water
  • Sprig of thyme/rosemary/sage

Method

  1. Put the bacon into a small saucepan of cold water and bring up to the boil to remove excess salt. 
  2. Drain, and dry the bacon on kitchen paper.  Heat up a frying pan, add 2 tbsp olive oil, sauté the bacon until nice and golden and crispy, remove to a casserole, add the chicken to the pan, adding more oil if necessary, saute the chicken for a few minutes until golden, then remove to the casserole and sauté the carrots, onions and garlic for a minute, seasoning with salt and pepper, adding them to the other sauted ingredients in the casserole.
  3. Deglaze the frying pan by adding the stock to the frying pan over a high heat and dissolving all the juices on the bottom. 
  4. Then pour the stock into the casserole, add a sprig of thyme or rosemary or sage and put into an oven at 160c for about 45 min or until cooked. 
  5. Strain the juices, if you like (if you have not added flour at the start) and spoon any fat off the top, add back in to the stew. 
  6. Sprinkle with some chopped parsley if you like. 
  7. Serve with mashed potatoes.
  • **NOTE Of course you could put potatoes on top of this in the casserole, like the Irish stew.
  • **NOTE You could also add 150ml white wine into the stock when you are deglazing the pan.
  • **NOTE If you want the juices to be slightly thick you can do 2 things