Chicken
Baked chicken & red cabbage with smashed garlic butterbeans
This is a wintery one-pot dish that is perfect with any kind of fowl or game bird. You bake your bird and braise your red cabbage in one go. The cabbage benefits from the juices that run from the cooking chicken and the meat is lightly flavoured by the spices and aromatics in the cabbage.
Cook's notes
Poaching the garlic cloves renders them soft and sweet, hence using what at first might seem like an excessive amount.
Ingredients
- 2 chicken legs
- oil, e.g. sunflower or light olive
- 1 veg stock cube
- 1 red cabbage - use ⅔ if small, ½ if large
- 1 red onion
- 1 pear
- ½ cinnamon stick
- ½ tsp juniper berries
- 1 star anise
- 1 tsp allspice
- 2 tsp dark brown sugar
- 60ml red wine
- 4 garlic cloves
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 tin butterbeans
- salt and pepper
Method
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Step 1
Preheat oven to 220°C/Gas Mark 6. Rub the chicken legs with a little oil and season them well with salt and pepper. Pop in the oven on the baking tray to take on a little colour for 20 minutes.
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Step 2
Meanwhile, boil a kettle and mix the stock cube with 250ml of boiling water. Stir until dissolved. Split the cabbage in half and remove the tough central root with a V-shaped cut. If it is a large cabbage finely slice half of it, smaller use about two thirds. Keep the rest for another meal.
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Step 3
Peel and slice the onion. Grate the pear, skin and all. Mix the two together in the casserole with the cabbage, cinnamon, juniper, star anise, allspice, sugar, wine and stock. Season with salt and pepper. Remove the chicken legs from the oven and nestle them into the red cabbage mixture.
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Step 4
Cover the pan with a lid or a tight fitting layer of foil. Drop the oven heat to 190°C/Gas Mark 5, and cook for 40 minutes. While the chicken cooks, peel the garlic cloves, place them in the saucepan with the bay leaf and just cover them with water. Simmer gently for 20 minutes until the garlic is completely soft. Drain and rinse the butterbeans.
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Step 5
Add them to the garlic pan and cook, mixing gently, until completely heated through, about 5 minutes. Drain away any excess water so that the beans are just shy of covered. Remove the bay leaf. With a fork or potato masher mash the garlic and beans together into a coarse mash.
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Step 6
Season with salt and pepper. Remove the chicken from the oven and tweak the seasoning of the cabbage to your liking. Serve the chicken on top of piles of dark, spicy cabbage with the mashed beans on the side.