Drunken Chicken

Hmm... it had quite a strong alcoholic flavour (I even guess the alcohol hasn't evaporated completely), and while I'm all for cooking with any kind of alcohol, this wasn't entirely pleasant. I guess the problem is a combination of three factors: 1. The alcohol should evaporate - you only want to get the flavour, not the alcohol as such - it's the chicken that supposed to end up 'drunk', not you; 2. It probably would have been less of a problem with wine or beer, but with Tequila (or Vodka in our case), the strong alcohol flavour is no big fun; 3. It completely lacked other flavours. The fun of cooking with alcohol is that it gives depth to the other flavours in the dish. However, if there are none (and seriously, none, no herbs or spices simmered together with the chicken, a big mistake in the first place), then there's little good the alcohol can achieve.

The only thing I keep wondering is how it was possible that the alcohol didn't evaporate, even though we kept the dish simmering for several hours (we actually don't own a slow cooker, we just let it simmer in a clay pot - any large pot would do the job). My suspicion is that because it was covered the whole time, the alcohol just went back into the dish.

Last, we had to add a lot of water to make sure everything is covered, which made for a very liquid sauce; it was a bit silly to turn the chicken in flour before frying, if you then proceed to braise it (all the crispness you get from the flour is gone once you submerge it in liquid), and the instructions were quite complicated given how simple the whole process actually was.