Baked Chicken & Carrots with Mirepoix Rice

I threw this meal together out of some veggies I needed to use up, and it turned out really delicious!

I wanted to bake the carrots, so I looked up recipes for that and liked the sound of a simple one using cumin & thyme, so I went with that. For the rice I used the classic French trio of 2 parts onion, 1 part celery, 1 part carrots as the base and then just cooked the rice like a pilaf. So this is two separate dishes, but it made a nice complete meal:

Baked Chicken & Carrots

Ingredients:

- 1 bag of baby carrots
- 2 T butter
- Chicken breasts, one per every 2 people
- Cumin, Thyme, Pepper, and Salt to taste
- 1/4 c Dry vermouth

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Dump the carrots (reserve about 10 carrots if you're making the rice below) into your favorite deep-dish casserole or dutch oven (that's what I used)
Sprinkle in salt, a few generous grinds of black pepper, lots of cumin, and plenty of thyme. Toss this all together a bit to coat the carrots with the spices.
Stick a pat of butter or two in the bottom of the dish, beneath the carrots.
Cut your chicken breasts into serving sizes: I had some freakishly huge chicken breasts, so I cut one into three pieces and served that to myself and two girlfriends, and we had plenty to eat. You might want to just cut your breasts into two pieces, half a breast per person.
Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper on both sides and toss them in on top of the carrots
Pour in just enough vermouth to put some liquid on the bottom of the pot, about 1/4 to 1/3 cups.
Cover with a lid or aluminium foil and toss that puppy into the oven for 40 minutes. In the mean time, you can make your rice!

Mirepoix Rice

Ingredients:

- 1 (16 oz) carton of low sodium, fat free chicken broth
- 1 1/3 C Basmati rice, or another long-grain aromatic rice (Kasmati, Jasmati, Jasmine...)
- 2 small onions
- some carrots
- 1 to 2 stalks of celery
- 2 T butter
- salt, pepper

Mirepoix, as I re-learned a few days ago thanks to the internet, is traditionally 2 parts onion, one part celery, and one part carrot, finely chopped and sauteed in butter, and used as the base for stocks, soups, stews, and whatever else you want to cook on top of it. Since I had all three ingredients on hand from the butternut squash soup I made last week, I needed to use them.

Chop up your onion first
Chop celery (or carrots) next until you have about half as much as the onion
Chop up the carrots (or celery) until you have the same amount as the previous step
Melt about 2 T butter over medium-low heat in a sautee pan with a good lid
Add your veggies and season with salt and pepper to taste
Sautee veggies in butter until they're nice and soft
Add your rice (yes, dry rice, no broth yet!) and stir it all up so the rice gets all mixed with the veggies and coated with the butter.
Sautee the rice with everything else until the rice turns translucent and gives off a nutty scent.
Add the chicken broth, turn heat to high, and bring to a boil.
Stir once, cover, and reduce heat to very low to simmer. The time for simmering should come from the rice packaging - my huge bag of basmati rice has me simmer for 10 minutes, remove from heat and sit (never take off the lid!!) for at least another 5 minutes. So chances are you need to simmer for at least 10 minutes, maybe more, and then give it plenty of time to sit, and never never never remove the lid. This is all MUCH easier to do without burning your rice if you have a gas stove; if you have electric, you might want to actually turn on another burner to low heat and move the pot to that burner once you start to boil, otherwise it will take too long to cool to a simmer.

The whole rice process should be pretty easy to finish within the 40 minutes the chicken and carrots take in the oven, so right around the time your rice is done sitting for 5 minutes and you take off the lid to fluff it, you can pull out the dutch oven and cut open a piece of chicken to make sure it's cooked all the way through. If it is, then you're ready to serve dinner! The juice in the bottom of the dutch oven is great over the rice, and if you're like me you just put the rice in the middle of your plate and the chicken and carrots right on top!

My favorite thing about this meal was how rich it tasted. I only used 2 Tablespoons of butter in each dish, plus the minimal fat from the chicken itself, so I think the richness must have come from the mirepoix and spices. It was so good, and quite easy with the chicken and carrots all in one pot! If you're used to making minute rice (yuck!), you might think the rice is cumbersome, but I've come to love rice so much that this cooking method is the norm for me and I don't think it's difficult at all, although I made rice a lot less when I had an electric stove. As long as you have gas and you remember to set your timer, you don't have to worry about the rice at all once the lid is on.