Man, oh, man...that was goooood Chicken!

Yesterday being Tuesday, it was my weekly eat-some-good-food-and-watch-some-good-TV-with-Carol-and-John night (aka "LOST Night" for now). We all seem to really enjoy these evenings, but since I started working full-time hours at my biggest client's office, it's been a little difficult to organize myself for my part of the food contribution. Basically, I either have to cook it on Monday night and reheat it at Carol's, or bring the ingredients and prepare it at her place on Tuesday.

Either way works fine. But then there's the added complication that I'm, well...lazy. So I'm constantly on the hunt for what I call "super-easy" recipes that are really yummy. I've posted a few of them here already. And just found a new one recently, thanks to my new favourite website: Pinterest.

This was named "Man-Pleasing Chicken" by the person whose website the recipe originally came from from (she stole it from somewhere else). It's very aptly named. And so super-easy. It literally took less than five minutes prep time and 40 minutes mostly ignoring it in the oven with just one check-in to baste.

The combination of mustard, vinegar and maple syrup is out of this world. Very flavourful, and the meat comes out moist and amazingly delicious.

Be sure to use a good quality Dijon. I was pleasantly surprised by its rich, full but not overpowering flavour, which was beautifully tempered by the maple syrup.

The recipe, as I made it was:

1 cup Dijon mustard
1/2 cup real Maple Syrup
1 tablespoons vinegar (I used cider vinegar)

Or, the easy way to customize it for your quantity of chicken is:
1 part Dijon
1/2 part Maple syrup
1 tbsp of vinegar to each part of Dijon

Just mix the ingredients till smooth and pour over the chicken pieces in a baking pan (use one with sides, not a cookie sheet). Turn the chicken to get it well coated, and leave it skin-side up, and then bake for 40 minutes at 450 degrees, basting halfway through. No need to turn it during baking.

Don't worry if it starts turning black on top. That's actually what you want...and it tastes really good! It's just the sugars in the maple syrup.

I used thighs, because I like 'em, but we all agreed this would work nicely on any type of chicken, and probably REALLY nicely on pork...possibly even better than chicken. But if I was putting it on pork, I'd marinate it for a couple of hours.

Enjoy!