Spanish Braised Chicken

1 T of butter (not pictured)
4 large chicken breast halves
1/2 t salt
1/4 t black pepper
2 cloves chopped garlic
1/2 t dried thyme
3 bell peppers, sliced (I used red and orange)
1 medium yellow onion, sliced in rings
1/2 cup cooking sherry (you could use apple juice)
2 t orange juice
12 large green olives, chopped

Plug in your crockpot and turn it to low. Add the butter to the bottom of the stoneware insert. Add the chicken--my chicken was frozen, but thawed would work, too. Add all of the dried spices to the chicken. Cut the peppers and onion, and chop or mince the garlic, to add to the mix. Top off with the cooking sherry and orange juice. Chop up the green olives, and sprinkle them on top.

Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours.

This recipe for Spanish Braised Chicken comes from A Year of Slow Cooking, my favorite place to find crockpot recipes. I copied and pasted the recipe from the blog, so the comments in the recipe itself are not mine.

This recipe is a crockpot recipe, but I needed a quick meal so I decided to try this on the stove-top. It worked! The exact cooking time is going to depend on the thickness of the meat, but I've used several different pieces of chicken and found them to all cook up quite quickly. To convert this to stovetop, all you do is simply put the ingredients in a frying pan in the order specified. I then turned it on high until the wine started to boil, and then turned the heat down (anything from medium to simmer works).

As for the wine, I had to substitute red cooking wine, as the store was sold out of cooking sherry. Yes, I know that you shouldn't cook with wine you wouldn't drink, and that cooking wine is very inferior. Once my confidence in cooking with wine increases, I promise I will branch out more. ;-)

My alterations were:
1 bag of frozen pepper/onion mix (instead of fresh onions/peppers)
red cooking wine (instead of cooking sherry)
Stovetop cooking (instead of the crockpot)
Different pieces of chicken (I think they were thighs, so just about any chicken would work)

Other possible alterations:
If you end up like me and need dinner ready in fifteen minutes (like I did yesterday!), here is another variation.
One fresh bell pepper (I was out of frozen peppers and fresh green peppers are cheaper than the others)
White cooking wine (discover you used the rest of the red cooking wine last time you made Spanish braised chicken, so you use this as a substitute)
Powdered garlic (a.k.a. forget to put in garlic, so you sprinkle some powered garlic on top after adding the rest of the ingredients).
Chicken tenderloins (they cooked extremely fast).
Omit the orange juice (or forget. Same thing. ;-).

This is some of the most delicious, juicy, tender, moist, flavorful chicken you'll ever taste. Yep, I love it! :-)