MEAT • PREP: 10 minutes • COOKING TIME: 1.5 hours•  SERVES: 6

Hi friends! Sorry about the long wait but here is another killer recipe to haunt your palates. I’m a little late (I have an imaginary Monday morning deadline for posting new recipes) but this week’s experiments in Foodland were a good lesson for me.  You see, in my quest to bring you the best recipes EVER, I over-complicated the darned thing.

I’ve been making this chicken for my family for a couple of years. Blessedly, we don’t suffer from peanut allergies, and the flavor is soft enough for my picky eaters and distinct enough for everyone who cares what goes into their mouths. What’s the problem, you ask? Well, when I decided to make the recipe for the blog, I decided it was TOO SIMPLE.  It needed culinary gravitas. A twist of unexpected creativity to take it over the top.  Something gourmet. This, my friends, was a bad idea. My poor family has been struggling to ingest terrible versions of this recipe all week. I tried honey (no). I tried molasses (hell no). I tried flour coatings, brown sugar, and ground peanuts (no, no, and sheesh). And ended up, you guessed it, right where I started.

So here it is. Oh. What’s that? You don’t put white sugar on your chicken? YOU DO NOW!!  Try it, you’ll see.

INGREDIENTS

• 8 chicken bottoms, cleaned and dried
• 2/3 tsp. salt
• ¼ tsp. black pepper
• 2/3 nutmeg pod, grated on a micro plane, or 1 tsp. ground nutmeg
• 3-4 tbsp. roasted peanut oil (I bought mine here)
• 1/3 c. white sugar
• ½ c. roasted, salted peanuts

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 350ᵒ.
2. Lay chicken bottoms in one layer in an aluminum pan.
3. Evenly sprinkle the salt, black pepper, and grated nutmeg on the chicken.
4. Gently and evenly drizzle the roasted peanut oil over the chicken pieces.
5. Coat the chicken with the white sugar. Be generous! It will caramelize in the oven.
6. Sprinkle the peanuts over the chicken.
7. Bake, covered, for 35 minutes.
8. Uncover the chicken, baste with pan juices, and continue to bake (uncovered) for an additional 35-45 minutes, until juices run clear and the chicken is lightly browned.