Roasted Orange Chicken with Sweet Potatoes

You may recall my roasted lime chicken adventure from last weekend. I decided to ride the coattails of that success. Essentially I repeat the spirit of that recipe but tweak a few details. It turned out alright this time but shows great promise.

I write out the whole recipe here even though it's really similar to last time. There are important differences.

Round 0 Ingredients:

2 lbs (approx)	boneless skinless chicken strips
1 large	orange
1 tsp	ground cinnamon
.25 cups	brown sugar
1.5 inches	fresh ginger

Round 1 Ingredients:

4	sweet potatoes (about 1 lb each)
.5 large	orange
.5 tsp	ground cinnamon
4 tsp	brown sugar
.5 tsp	black pepper

Round 2 Ingredients:

.5 large

orange

Procedure:
Preheat oven to 350F. Using a fine grater, pulp ginger. Zest your orange then cut it in half. Mince orange zest, ginger pulp, cinnamon, and sugar with as much orange juice as necessary to make a paste (it won't take much). Line the bottom of a 9x13 pyrex pan with your chicken strips and cover uniformly with the paste. Juice the rest of the orange over the chicken. Put the orange rind on top, cover the pan with foil, and place in the oven for 20 minutes.



In the meantime, skin your potatoes and cut them into wedges. Boil for 10 to 15 minutes, until they start to be tender, then drain them. Mix dry ingredients together. Once your chicken has finished the first round of cooking, take it out of the oven and peel pack the foil. Put the potatoes over the chicken then sprinkle the sugar mix over them. Squeeze the half orange over that, replace the foil, and return to the oven for 20 more minutes.



Zest the rind from the previous round as well as the remaining unsqueezed half. Chop the zest a little bit to get rid of any particularly long pieces. When the time comes, remove the chicken from oven and discard the foil. Squeeze the last of the orange over the potatoes and sprinkle the zest over them. Return to the oven without foil for 30 minutes (it's probably done after 20 but I don't mess around with chicken). After removing it, check to see that the chicken is done then serve.



There will probably still be quite a bit of liquid in the bottom of the pan when it's done, particularly if you were not thorough in draining your potatoes. In hindsight I believe it would have been appropriate to discard the foil when the potatoes were first added in order for more fluid to boil off.

I also found this dish to be lacking the bite I was hoping for. It's possible that the amount of ginger needs to be increased or dried ginger could be added. It might help to turn some of the orange juice into lemon. Perhaps it would even be appropriate to add some garlic to the rub; this would add the aggression I was hoping for though it might fight with the other flavors.

Compared to the lime rub last week I was disappointed in how little the flavor soaked into the potatoes this time. I would also therefore recommend adding orange juice to the water they boil in, perhaps even put the rinds in there instead of with the chicken.