Chicken with Pomegranate Sauce

When I have pomegranates in the kitchen I pop the seeds out of the fruit and into a bowl and offer them up as dessert, eaten with a spoon straight from the bowl, with no additional steps.  Other people like to put pomegranates into salads, in the breakfast yogurt and in baked goods like muffins. The Full Belly recipe page has a recipe for a salad using pomegranates with toasted walnuts. According to the nutrition experts, pomegranates are a powerful source of antioxidants, thus an important part of a healthy and balanced diet.

Various web sites have instructions on how to extract the seeds, including the Full Belly recipe page  (https://fullbellyfarm.com/recipes-for/pomegranates/), but it’s always likely to be a little bit messy, because of the beautiful deep red juice that may splatter around despite your best efforts.

There are several famous dishes that use pomegranates with meat, like Fesenjan, Persian Chicken Stew.  A lot of these dishes don’t use the fresh seeds, but require pomegranate molasses or syrup – made by cooking down the the seeds and juice with some sugar and lemon. Our recipe of the week is for an easy-to-make pomegranate sauce that you can put over roasted chicken.

1/4 cup olive oil
3 or 4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 chicken, roasted (roasting recipe not included here)
1 pomegranate
1/4 dry white wine
Juice from 1 lemon
1 Tablespoon of Sugar
Salt and Pepper

Mix the oil and garlic in a cup and brush it over the chicken before roasting.

Remove 1/4-cup of seeds from the pomegranate and set them aside for garnish. Squeeze the remaining pomegranate juice through a sieve into a small saucepan. Mix in the wine, lemon juice and sugar. Bring to a boil and cook over a low heat for 5 minutes.  Season it with salt and pepper. 

Transfer the chicken to a serving planter and cut into pieces.  Pour the sauce over the chicken and garnish with pomegranate seeds.