food – Singing about Cooking

While doom scrolling one night, I came across this recipe video for Middle Eastern Chicken and Potato one pot bake. Mmmm, mm – now that’s my kind of dinner inspiration.

The Things I Like and Will Use

One pot – while the video shows using a pot that is commonly used when starting a meal on the stove and then finishing in the oven, there’s no reason you can’t or shouldn’t use a sheet pan or standard baking dish.

Chicken thighs – bone in with the skin – this is my favorite piece of chicken to cook with. The little extra fat keeps it juicy while cooking and adds that little bit of extra flavor you just can’t get from a chicken breast.

Covered and uncovered cooking. When cooking meat with the bone in, it can be hard to confidently cook it through, so cooking covered – foil or lid – is an excellent way to achieve this. And then the shorter uncovered time is for crisping up the skin so if you are eating that (and you don’t have to), it’s a delightfully crispy crunch.

The Things I’ll Take Inspiration From and Why

Now, I love the idea and all of the individual and collective flavors of this dish, but I find myself on a tighter food budget these days. So here’s how I’m making this work with what’s in my pantry.

Lemon – rather than rely on fresh lemons and their rising cost from tariffs, I keep a bottle of lemon juice in the fridge. It’s controversial with professional chefs, but it’s far more versatile and I don’t have to worry about it going bad or drying out.

And as it happens, I also just bought a ton of Greek lemon infused olive oil, so I’ll also be prepping the baking dish with this lemon oil to contribute to the dish as well.

Tomato paste – I don’t cook anything that uses tomato paste – not even marinara. So I never have this ingredient in the house. What do I have? Ketchup. So tonight, the “sauce” base is ketchup.

Aleppo pepper – that’s a pretty specific spice that’s not part of my pantry, but in the spirit of peppers with and without heat, I have lots of others. For this, I added a squeeze of Sriracha for just a hint of heat and smoked paprika for the smokiness from dried pepper.

Cumin – so I definitely have cumin, but I was feeling more curry, so I switched. That simple – followed what my palate was more interest in.

Carbs – so this dish as shown in the video is pretty high carb and not at all diabetic friendly, so I made some simple additions and one subtraction to balance this out:

removed rice – because rice is my least favorite carb
added quartered onions
added chunks of zucchini

Both the onion and zucchini are highly traditional additions to meals from countries and cultures east of the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and to the Pacific.

Side Note on the Term “Middle Eastern”

I’m nearing my 50th birthday as I make this dinner, and I recall a video excerpt I found earlier this week that challenged the terms “middle East” and “far East” as colonial, and therefore, oppressive terms. Yes, I agree, and I wanted to bring your attention to this. You see, the words “middle” and “east” only have meaning when we know the origin point – middle compared to what? east compared to what fixed point. In this case – it’s London – the center of the British colonial empire.

In that paradigm, then, “East” refers to everything east of the Mediterranean to the Pacific ocean, the middle of which is the Arabic and Indian countries and cultures and the “far” of which is the aggregate of the Asian cultures.

I offer these as generalized geographic assignments for the colonial “Middle East”:

Western Asia
Southwest Asia
West Asia and North Africa (WANA)

I offer these as generalized geographic assignments for the colonial “Far East”:

East Asia
Pacific Asia
Northeast Asia – Korea, Japan, northern China
Southeast Asia – Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia

I offer these as generalized geographic assignments for the colonial “Indian subcontinent”:

South Asia
The subcontinent

I offer these as generalized geographic assignments for Arabic-speaking regions

Arab world or Arab states
North Africa and Arabian Peninsula

These alternatives focus on the geography relative to the region itself rather that in comparison with a conquering or colonial empire center.

One of the obvious challenges to Westerners is that our sense of world geography is likely to confound most in correcting our terminology. Beyond that, these terms have been assigned cultural meaning as well that may not align with the geographic/continental mapping, where a term like “Middle Eastern” is generalize to Arabic speaking countries regardless of their geographic location, and likewise “Far East” to a reductive understanding of Asian to refer to those of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korea, and Indonesian descent.

This discussion deserves far more exploration, so thank you for not skimming just to get to more details about the recipe.

The Ingredients

In the recommended order of preparing (to make it easy to assemble):

8 tiny golden creamer potatoes, quartered (or 4 medium or 2 large)
3-4 small yellow or white onions, peeled and quartered
2 medium zucchinis, cut into 1-inch thick “slices” or round chunks
1/2 cup ketchup (or the tomato and pepper paste combo from the original recipe)
1/2 lemon juice (bottle or fresh squeezed)
1T Sriracha (or 1T Aleppo pepper from the original recipe)
1T curry (or cumin from the original recipe)
1T garlic powder (or 4-5 fresh cloves minced)
1T oregano
2t salt
1t pepper
4-6 chicken thighs, bone in with skin (or breasts or leg quarters)

The Assembly Process

Here’s how to layer it all into your baking dish.

Step 1: wash and chop your potatoes, onion, and zucchini. Drop them all into a greased baking dish, ideally into a single layer. They’ll be squished together, which is good.

potatoes, onions, and zucchini - large cut and mixed in the bottom of the baking dish

Step 2: in a measuring cup or other vessel with a pour spout, add your wet and spice ingredients and then mix well with a whisk or fork.

sauce ingredients collected and started in the measuring cup with pour spout

Step 3: pour about half of the sauce over the veggies. Use a spoon or tongs to toss the veggies in the sauce to coat all sides.

Step 4: place your chicken on top.

Step 5: pour most of the remaining sauce and use your hand(s) to quickly coat the entire chicken thigh – not just the top. Pour any remaining sauce on top of the chicken.

use all of the sauce - half on the veggies first and the remaining amount on the chicken placed on top of the veggies in the backing dish

The Cooking Process

Step 1: preheat the oven to 400 degrees Farenheit. NOTE: I do not wait for the oven to fully preheat to put in the dish; my oven rarely takes more than 7-8 minutes total to preheat, so the difference is negligible for such a long-baking dish.

Step 2: cover the baking dish with foil, wrapping the edges snuggly around the end handles.

foil sealed baking dish placed on the lowest oven rack (closest to the baking heating element)

Step 3: bake for 45 minutes with the foil on and on the lowest rack, closest to the baking element (usually at the bottom of the oven).

Step 4: slide out the oven rack and remove the foil lid.

Step 5: push the oven rack back in and set the timer for another 15 minutes. This is an essential step for cooking the skin to be pleasant to eat and ensure the meat is fully cooked.

Step 6: take out of the oven and let rest for 10-15 minutes to cool enough to eat without burning fingers and tongues.

Enjoy!

I’ve been craving lasagna, but anything Italian is really hard when your food allergies/intolerances hit all three major Italian points: pasta, cheese, and tomatoes. I mean, c’mon, it’s their flag, for crying out loud.

Gluten-free Lasagna Noodles

Gluten free pasta is easy as long as you have some kind of access to the Italian made stuff – and thank Amazon, I do! These gluten free, egg free, no cook lasagna noodles are perfect. In fact, one box makes two 9×9 lasagnas for the single person (or maybe 2-person family). Highly recommend, but you do you.

Buy on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HRJNNSS/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?smid=A3MXLTRINUPWUY&psc=1

Tomato-free Sauce

This piece of the puzzle has taken me the longest to figure out because all of the “red” vegetables are nightshades, and that’s specifically what I need to avoid – no tomatoes, no peppers. And it finally hit me – ratatouille sauce: roast down what’s currently in season and then blend into a sauce.

What I made today is

1 zucchini
2 carrots
1 whole pod of garlic
1 package of frozen riced cauliflower
2 cups homemade vegetable stock
2T Badia Italian Seasoning
1t salt
1t pepper (I like a little kick)
2T cooking oil of your choice (I like grapeseed oil)

Roast the zucchini, carrots, and garlic at 350 for 45 minutes. While those are roasting, dump the frozen riced cauliflower in a sauce pan with 1 cup of the veggie stock and heat on low, mainly to thaw the cauliflower; you don’t need to “cook” anything.

When the roasting veggies are done, add them to the sauce pan and blend with an immersion blender. Add more veggie stock as needed to get to your desired thick or thinness.

Set aside until ready to assemble.

Dairy-free Ricotta Filling

In the absence of any options for dairy-free ricotta in any market (brick-and-mortar or online), I turn to tofu, which is my go-to for replacing “creamy” ingredients. Normally for this I use silken tofu as it’s already in a soft, silky, creamy state. But I only had extra firm tofu today to make this recipe, so here’s how I turned it into even better faux ricotta than when I use silken: crumble it up well with your fingers, add about 1 cup of liquid (I used my homemade veggie stock), and blend with an immersion blender (secret weapon of this recipe, IMO). Then I add my “regular” mixins:

1 cup shredded zucchini
1 package of sliced mushrooms – sauteed until golden brown
1/2 medium white onion, finely diced (about 2/3 cup) – sauteed with the mushroom until translucent
3 cloves garlic, finely minced
1T Badia Italian Seasoning blend – you do you
1/2t salt
1/4t pepper

I forgot to take the mise en place photo before I dumped the zucchini and spices into the tofu ricotta.

Cook the mushrooms by themselves in the same pan you roasted the ratatouille veggies in – no extra oil is needed. Once the mushrooms have browned and the water they released evaporated, move them all to the outer edge of the pan and drop in the onions. Sautee maybe 2-3 minutes more until the onions are less white and moving towards clear-ish. Scoop it all into a bowl to cool for just a minute before mixing into the tofu ricotta.

Mix well in a bowl and set aside until ready to layer.

One of my favorite things about tofu as opposed to soy is that tofu is high protein with almost no carbs; soy is just the opposite – mostly carb with a modest amount of protein much lower than the carb load.

Let’s Assemble

There’s no wrong way to layer lasagna, but I have a few things I like to do to ensure the no-cook noodles are given the best shot at success:

Start with sauce on the bottom of the pan before you put in noodle sheets
Top each layer with sauce so the noodles are always being set into sauce

When you do this, you ensure that there is always liquid surrounding the noodles during cooking so that they come out lovely and fully cooked like pasta should be.

Otherwise, the tip is to be patient, and to press the thicker layer instead of “spreading” them.

Final Bake

Once you’ve got all your layers done, bake at 350 for 35 minutes. If you are using any cheese on top of yours – regular or dairy free – I recommend adding at the 30-minute mark and baking for about 10 more minutes (longer if you like your cheese browned and crunchy).