Recipe: My Personal Pollo Alla Cacciatora

We finally did some grocery shopping and I’m very excited to finally have ingredients again to cook. I was getting tired of trying to make different pasta dishes with whatever weird stuff I could find. I have never purchased a whole chicken before, mostly because I thought they would be too expensive, but I found out that one chicken cost less than one little Cornish hen, and sure, the hen may have been healthier if it had been raised properly, but I doubt it. In fact, the two taste exactly the same when prepared this way.

What you will need…

Chicken Cacciatora.

• A whole chicken.

• Onions.

• Garlic.

• Canned or fresh cubed tomatoes.

• Capers.

• Olive oil.

• Parmesan cheese.

• Salt.

• Bacon.

• Thyme and rosemary.

How to make it…

1. Chop the garlic and place it in a pan with a teaspoon of olive oil. Allow it to brown a bit.
2. Add the onions and let them cook until transparent.
3. Chop the bacon and add that as well.
4. Keep stirring until the bacon cooks for a few minutes and add in the herbs.
5. Take a third of the onion mix and stuff it inside the chicken. Place a couple of capers under the skin.
6. Place the chicken in a big pot, dump in a large can of diced tomatoes, or chop up 4 tomatoes and add two cups of water.
7. Add a teaspoon of salt and a couple of more pinches of rosemary and thyme as you see fit.
8. Turn on the heat to medium and add a teaspoon of capers (or more, if you like) and half the jar of the capers’ vinegar.
9. Wait for the sauce to begin to boil around the chicken and then turn it to low and cover.
10. After an hour, flip the chicken around. You may want to baste the chicken with the sauce every 15 minutes to allow it to absorb the flavors.
11. Let it slow cook for a few hours. The longer you cook it, the more tender and blended the flavors become.
12. Place some of the chicken on a plate along with some of the tomatoes and sauce and sprinkle with Parmesan.
13. Eat up!

Tip: You can always brown the chicken with your preferred method before slow cooking it. Remember that you can always place the left overs in a slow cooker or back in a pot to reheat. The best thing about slow cooking is that you don’t really need to pay much attention to it especially if you use a slow cooker! Just dig in when you’re hungry.

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