Chicken Tagine with Olives, Zucchini, and Honey

This is a variation on the Chicken Tagine with Olives and Lemon. I happened to have a surplus of zucchini in the house, so chose this option.

The recipe calls for chicken thighs, but the intro says you can substitute a whole, cut-up chicken, which I had, while reducing the cooking time so as not to dry out the breast parts. (Also, the intro says to discard the wings, but I left the first joint on the upper half of each breast bit, since it's fairly meaty and my DH likes this bit.) I was a bit puzzled why, if it takes 75 minutes to cook 8 thighs, it takes only 45 minutes to cook 8 parts of the whole bird. So I ignored the timing, and indeed the breasts were a bit dry, but the thighs and legs were gorgeous. I would not use a whole bird (or mixed white/dark meat) for this again. This is the kind of recipe where you can let it cook away for quite a while and it seems silly to worry about the time for the sake of the white meat, when the dark meat takes so much better to this kind of treatment.

The recipe instructions are clear and the dish is easy to make. With dark meat only, this would be a good company dish, since it sits in the oven for quite a while and timing isn't really critical, leaving you free for other things.

I reduced the honey in this variation to only 1 tablespoon, rather than 2. We thought that was enough sweet. Also, the recipe calls for 1 medium zucchini weighing about 12oz. Maybe I mis-remember the size of US zucchini, but I think that might be 3 zucchs. I used two, smallish French ones that totalled 12oz.