One Pot Thanksgiving Chicken | Whole30 friendly

For my husband, Fall means the flavors of Thanksgiving. This one pot thanksgiving chicken brings all of those delicious tastes together in the easiest weeknight chicken dish on my menu. 

Thanksgiving is my husband’s favorite holiday. No gifts to buy, lots of delicious food (including turkey). and an afternoon of laying in front of the tv watching football. We have “Thanksgiving dinner” on a smaller scale several times a year – but it’s so much work. Not just the cooking, which I mostly enjoy, but the clean up!

So this year, when I noticed him looking longingly at the turkeys starting to hit the shelf, I started playing with ideas for an easy, weeknight dinner that delivered those much loved flavors. My requirements:

1. no more than 30 minutes of prep
2. pre-packaged options available for when I really don’t have time
3. reasonably healthy
4. included those herby flavors of traditional thanksgiving dinner

I knew that I wanted to use bone in chicken thighs because they are cheap, always available and bone in chicken reheats better than boneless. Sweet potatoes made sense to give it a bit of a creamy texture without having to actually mash anything. Other than that, it was just trial and error.

And when it worked? Oh, tonight’s dinner was glorious. Simple, easy to throw together, perfect for Monday…and the first word’s out of my husband’s mouth when he walked through the front door? “It smells like Thanksgiving in here!”

One Pot Thanksgiving Chicken

Ingredients

4-6 bone in, skin on chicken thighs

olive oil, about 2 tbsp

1 large sweet potato, peeled & diced

1 medium yellow onion, diced

1/2 lb shredded brussels sprouts

1 large or 2 medium honeycrisp apples, cored & diced

1 tsp pomegranate balsamic (or another high quality balsamic that you like)

fresh sage, rosemary & thyme (amount will vary to taste, see below)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees
2. Heat 1 tbsp olive oil over med high heat in an oven save pot (I use a Le Crueset 3 1/2 qt braiser – one of my favorites!).
3. Season skin side of chicken with salt and pepper and place skin side down and cook until the chicken is lightly browned and pulls away from the bottom of the pan. Turn each piece over and turning off heat.
4. While chicken is cooking, dice the sweet potato, onion, and apples. Combine olive oil & pomegranate balsamic in a bowl, add sweet potato, onion & apples and toss.
5. Dump mixture and brussels sprouts into pan, spreading it out as evenly as you can. Top with herbs. Pop in the oven and cook for 20 minutes or until chicken reaches 160 degrees and sweet potato is cooked through.

I’m not joking when I say this is the perfect Monday comfort food option. It’s so simple to put together that I managed it while convincing my 7 year old that his loose tooth didn’t necessitate a trip to the ER, chatting with my neighbor about her days-away military move to Korea and flipping the laundry. Short on time for food prep? You could easily use packaged diced sweet potatoes, packaged shredded brussels sprouts and 1 tsp each of dried sage, rosemary and thyme – seriously cutting down on the amount of prep you need to do. Want to bulk it up a little bit? Use a small butternut squash instead of the sweet potato and quarter the brussels sprouts instead of shred them (it just gives you a chunkier texture).

For the herbs, I hugely prefer the use of fresh herbs and I typically have these in the fridge during the fall. Because sage, rosemary, thyme and hard cider are simple kitchen essentials from back to school through Thanksgiving. I use 3-4 sage sage leaves, 2 stalks of fresh rosemary and 2-3 stalks of thyme.

I have a feeling that this recipe will become a fast favorite in our regular rotation!

What flavors say Fall to you?

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