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Becky Campbell's Chicken With Carambola

Category: Fruit

Author: The Savvybearcat

Date: 1/1/2007

Rating:

(2.0) by 2 users

Ingredients:

1 3.5 to 4 lb. chicken - cut in pieces
1/4 cup Olive oil
1/4 cup Lime juice, freshly squeezed
2 Limes, minced zest of
2 small Onions - peeled and thinly sliced
2 tbsp Mild honey
1 tbsp Fresh ginger, minced
1 Fresh serrano or jalapeno with seeds, minced
4 Carambola (4 oz. each)* - cut in 1/4" thick slices
Salt
1/2 cup Almonds, raw and whole
1 small Cilantro bunch, to garnish

Instructions:

*When you buy carambola, also called star fruit, look for ones that
are uniformly yellow to orange and have a subtle perfume. If they are
green, they aren't ripe and won't yield a great deal of flavor. At
their ripest, their flavor is an unmistakably tropical combination of
apple, banana and lychee.

Rinse chicken well and pat it thoroughly dry.

In a large bowl, whisk together olive oil, lime juice and zest,
onions, honey, ginger and minced pepper. Stir in three-fourths of the
carambola slices. Then add the chicken, and turn it until it is
coated with the marinade. Cover and refrigerate overnight, or up to
2 days, turning the chicken occasionally so it marinates evenly.

Arrange chicken in a single layer in a 9 x 13" baking dish; season
generously with salt. Add almonds to the marinade, stir, and spoon
it over the chicken. Bake at 375 F. in the center of the oven,
basting frequently with pan juices and turning any chicken pieces
that get too brown, about 35 minutes. Add remaining carambola, stir,
and continue cooking until the chicken is golden and a thigh yields
clear juice when pricked at its thickest part, 15 to 20 minutes.
Taste the sauce and adjust the seasoning. Just before serving, mince
the cilantro if you are using it. Serve chicken right from the baking
dish, or divide among four warmed dinner plates. Spoon sauce over the
chicken, garnish with cilantro and serve.

This dish can be prepared up to 2 days in advance. Goes well with a
semi-dry German Kabinett, such as Deirhard 1989.

Loomis writes: "Becky Campbell became a tropical fruit aficionado
through the career of her husband, Carl, who is an internationally
known tropical fruit expert. He researched and taught at the
University of Florida, where he is now professor emeritus. She
became an expert on cooking with tropical fruits, and lectured and
taught cooking classes for years. Together they developed a small
tropical fruit orchard in the backyard of their home near Homestead,
Florida.

"Becky refers to the tropical fruit orchard that surrounds their
single-story home as a 'mini experiment station.' Her husband does the
experimenting, and she brings the bounty into the kitchen. Their
orchard produces everything from Key limes and carambola to black
sapote and mangoes.

"Becky and Carl were recently in Uganda, where carambola is as common
as green grapes are here. There she picked up valuable tips for using
the lovely star-shaped fruit, and she set out samples for us to
taste: golden star-shaped slices of dried carambola, carambola
leather and carambola preserves, where the stars were suspended in a
thick sweet syrup. They were all delicious."

From _Farm House Cookbook_ by Susan Herrmann Loomis. New York: Workman
Publishing Company, Inc., 1991. Pp. 145-146. ISBN 0-89480-772-2.
Electronic format by Cathy Harned.