Chicken with Tomatoes and Garlic

This recipe is another one from Ree (find it here). I only cook her recipes when I'm feeling ambitious. She rated the difficulty level of this one as 'easy', but I'd say it's more like medium. Then again, I'm an amateur. This is also my first experience cooking with wine. I liked it.

First, heat three tbsp oil and one tbsp butter in a Dutch oven on the stove.

Then toss in six chicken drumsticks and brown them.

Enter: the wine. What can I say, I like it cheap - my wine, that is.

Pour a little (or a lot of) wine in the Dutch oven. Stir it up so it mixes with all the wonderful juices from the chicken. And make sure you get all the bits unstuck from the bottom of the pot. That's flavor. Then let it all cook together for a minute or so.

The you add the tomatoes and tomato paste. Ree used one can of diced and one can of whole. I used two cans of tomato sauce because we don't like tomato chunks. Bring all that goodness to a boil, adding salt and pepper to taste. Then turn the heat off.

Now you're supposed to add lots of fresh herbs. I tried to get fresh herbs, I honestly tried. But when I went to the grocery store, all they had was parsley. Seriously, they didn't even have basil. I was tres disappointed. So I just used the dried stuff. Here we have rosemary, sage, basil, and parsley. There are also eight whole cloves of garlic (peeled, of course) in this picture, but you can't really see them because they kind of sunk.

Then put the chicken legs in.

Put the cover on, and pop it in the oven for about an hour.

(Like my new Dutch oven? I got it for Mother's Day. Love it!)

It's very important that your oven, like mine, is extremely dirty and desperately needs to be cleaned. It adds to the dish. :)

I must say, this created some of the best fragrances that have ever come out of this oven. It smelled heavenly!

And it tasted pretty good too! I made penne noodles to go with it. James liked it too. Although he liked the sauce better than the chicken. He's more of a breast kinda guy... chicken breasts, of course.

Man, what's with me today?

If I make this again, I'll probably use chicken breasts, which I think would work fine.

Thanks, Ree, for another great recipe!