Crispy skin? Check. Creamy pan sauce? You bet.
Ever since the holidays, I’ve been feeling super lazy in the kitchen and relying heavily on very simple 30-minute meals to get dinner on the table. Like my last column (a delicious navy bean soup), this chicken with spinach and mustard sauce requires only five ingredients (not counting cooking oil or salt). I had originally intended for this chicken to be braised low and slow, until I was hit hard with a craving for crispy chicken skin. I ended up with a delectable skillet dinner instead: pan-fried chicken thighs and wilted spinach smothered in a creamy mustard sauce.
The most important part of this recipe is removing the bones from bone-in chicken thighs but leaving the skin on. For whatever reason, it’s tricky (but not impossible) to find boneless, skin-on chicken in American grocery stores, so you’ll likely have to do a bit of butchering yourself, but it’s so worth it. Once deboned, the meat can be unfolded into a thinner layer, allowing it to be seasoned more thoroughly and cook faster. It also makes for a more ideal skin-to-meat ratio, with a bit of crispy skin in every bite. This means a lot coming from me—I hate cutting up raw chicken and will do almost anything to avoid it. But all you need to do is cut around the bone with a sharp knife. No worries if you don’t do the cleanest job—no one will be able to tell once the chicken is cooked.
As the chicken thighs cook, they will release an impressive amount of fat into the pan. You’ll want to pour off most of it (save it for roasting potatoes, if you like), leaving behind just a tablespoon as a base for the cream sauce. Since the chicken fat is so flavorful already, you only need to add a few ingredients to make a delicious sauce. First, minced garlic is sautéed in the rendered fat, followed by a whole bag of baby spinach. You know the drill: This will initially seem like way too much spinach, but it will quickly shrink down. Finally cream and whole grain mustard are stirred in and simmered until everything reduces into a velvety sauce.
Some sort of carb is crucial for soaking up the rich sauce—white rice or chunks of crusty bread both have my vote, though a tangle of spaghetti certainly wouldn’t go amiss either. One note of advice though—don’t let this dish sit for too long before serving it. The skin of the chicken is crispiest if served within 10 minutes of being cooked. That’s never an issue for me, though, since I can hardly resist eating it straight from the pan.