Mango Chicken Leg Stew Done My Way

             Towards the beginning of the month I was at the meat department in a Key Food store in search of a new challenge to cook. Key Food maintains the widest varieties of meats at the lowest prices compared to other supermarkets. There was a package of chicken legs under three dollars which was too cheap to pass up. Plus, since I never cooked chicken legs on my own without adult supervision, this was the exact type of mountain I was looking to climb. I didn't have an actual plan of attack; I simply bought the package and tossed it in my freezer once I got home from the supermarket. A couple of weeks later I defrosted the chicken legs and left them in the refrigerator. For a various number of reasons I wasn't able to do any of the cooking I was hoping to accomplish. Unsure if I was going to use these legs in the near future or not, I contemplated placing them back into the freezer, but I really didn't like the idea of freezing and unfreezing them yet again. I looked around my kitchen and brainstormed what I could do with these legs, then I saw my answer laying in a fruit basket. I had also bought two mangoes that day at the Key Food - which were finally ripe. The first mango was consumed in the morning and I had the taste for more. That's when it struck a chord in my mind that I should incorporate the last mango with these chicken legs.

             My weapon of choice was going to be a crock pot, so I could cook the legs in a hot broth and have the flavor from the mango (as well as other ingredients) soak into the soft meat of the chicken. I skinned and diced the mango into little cube pieces. It's very tempting to consume all the mango pieces on the plate, so you have to limit yourself to stealing just one piece only. Another important item that needs to be skinned, sliced, and diced, is an onion. The bitterness of the onion serves as the perfect contrast to the sweetness of the mango. Once the crock pot is ready, pour in a can of chicken broth, one cup of water, and half a cup and water. Place the drumsticks into the pot and then begin adding the other flavors: two strands of thyme, with sprinklings of oregano, herbs de provence, garlic salt, and regular salt. Lastly, dump in the cubed pieces of mango and sliced onions. Make sure the fire is barely above a whisper and its preferred to use a wooden grandma spoon to initially mix the legs in the broth with the flavors inside. Afterwards, you can place the lid on top to cover the pot. It needs to cook long and methodical, so the fire must remain very low. The cooking time takes about an hour and fifteen minutes in total. While it cooks its never a bad idea to check on it every ten minutes and use the wooden spoon to stir gently for a few seconds. If an hour passes by and there's steam shooting from any possible crevasse in the crock pot, that's usually the telltale sign the legs are ready.

             The mango cubes should still be visible once the drumsticks are ready, but at this point the pieces have been stewing in the broth so long that the sweet taste of the mango will be gone. On the flip side, the sweetness from the mango juice would make its way into the soft meat of the chicken, its a fair trade. If cooked correctly, the meat will be so soft that it should easily slip off the bone once you begin handling the drumstick. The natural side dish in this situation would be rice, but instead I had leftover broccoli from a Chinese take-out place the night before that I wanted to use before they went bad. I heated them up in the microwave and set them on the plate when I knew the legs were just about ready. I took my first bite and was surprised the meat cooked to near-perfection. It's was certainly beginners luck with these chicken legs as usually they don't even come out as soft when you order them from a restaurant. With my flag sticking out from the top of this mountain, I'll need to return to Key Food in search of the next meat to conquer.

             I'm going to need to look somewhere else other than the fruit basket for assistance....