If everything in my organic garden just froze overnight, then apparently it must be the first day of fall here in the mountains of Southern California. Here at 7,000 feet, under the Jeffrey pin
es, no, we don’t mark the beginning of autumn by Starbucks offering Pumpkin Spiced Latte to every girl named Taylor in UGG booties walking by. No, we don’t mark September 22nd in a Pumpkin-Palooza. We mark it by crying over wilted basil at the community garden.
Never mind that the local weather forecast claimed our overnight low would only be 47 degrees. Tell that to my green tomatoes hanging frozen and defeated on the vine. Tell that to my basil, which yesterday was happily living its best pesto life and this morning looks like somebody put it through a vegetable cryotherapy experiment.
But instead of crying over frozen basil, I’m choosing autumn.
I’m defrosting some Costco chicken thighs, smothering them in tamarind, pomegranate molasses and organically grown local citrus, and telling myself this is exactly how I planned my Tuesday. I’ll pick whatever organic fennel survived the Great September Garden Massacre and turn the whole situation into these Tamarind Chicken Thighs.
And yes, I’m even adding sweet potatoes. Are they exactly low-carb? No. Did I just lose half my vegetable garden overnight? Also no—because I’m pretty sure I lost considerably more than half. This feels like an emotional-support sweet potato situation to me, the hiker gal in the gently thrifted romper over here.
I could spend the afternoon moping around the cabin with my Norwegian Forest Cat Collection, staring dramatically at my frozen tomatoes. Or I could prepare the marinade for this tamarind chicken recipe, pack the Dutch oven into our 25-year-old motorhome and drive five hours north toward the Eastern Sierra because it’s autumn, dammit.
If the basil is dead, I’m going leaf peeping.
There are forests of orange and yellow aspens waiting for me, UGG hiking boots that need to get dirty and approximately 4,700 fall-color photographs that aren’t going to take themselves. And after a long day of chasing autumn down Highway 395, these slow-roasted Tamarind Chicken Thighs are exactly the kind of easy fall dinner I want bubbling away back at the motorhome.
When Your Home Oven Dies, Take the Recipe on Vacation
Of course, creating all these glorious savory fall recipes becomes considerably more complicated when the oven in that mountain cabin decides it no longer wishes to participate.
Our oven recently gave up on life, which is inconvenient for someone who spends October wanting to slow-roast absolutely everything she sees. On the bright side, perhaps Thanksgiving has been canceled. Such a shame. It looks like my “Artist” brother won’t be able to come plug up the toilet this Thanksgiving! If we don’t have a working oven, how on earth will I host the whole extended family? So I guess I won’t have to listen to my liberal cousins’ hairbrained ideology and get a headache from trying not to roll my eyes.
Every broken appliance has a silver lining.
Fortunately, while the oven in our house has apparently entered early retirement, the 25-year-old oven in our motorhome still works just fine. Because naturally it does. Apparently Fleetwood built that thing to survive the apocalypse while modern household appliances are emotionally exhausted by Tuesday.
So if I can’t spend an afternoon at home basting Tamarind Chicken Thighs, I’ll pack the pomegranate molasses, tamarind paste, locally grown oranges my neighbor gifted me and my trusty Dutch oven into the RV and head for higher mountain pastures.
This is what I call problem solving.
As you prepare for your own fall-color and leaf-peeping adventures—whether that’s here in California or somewhere across the country—don’t forget that your RV kitchen can create some seriously fantastic fall comfort food. These Tamarind Chicken Thighs bring sweet, tart and savory flavors together with fennel, citrus, warming spices and a sticky tamarind glaze that tastes considerably more sophisticated than something I cooked while wearing hiking clothes in a 25-year-old motorhome.
Tamarind Paste: Because Pumpkin Spice Can’t Season Everything
If you’ve never cooked with tamarind paste before, don’t let the mysterious brown jar lurking in the international aisle intimidate you. Tamarind comes from the pod-like fruit of the tamarind tree, and its pulp has an intensely sweet-sour, fruity flavor. Think citrusy tartness with a deeper, almost caramel-like fruitiness rather than simply sour.
Tamarind is especially important in South Asian cooking. In India, you’ll find
it bringing its unmistakable tang to everything from sambar and rasam to chutneys, curries and chaats. It’s particularly prominent in many South Indian dishes, although tamarind is used across numerous regional cuisines as well as throughout Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and beyond.
And this recipe? Let’s just admit it has passport stamps.
These Tamarind Chicken Thighs aren’t intended to be a traditional Indian recipe. The tamarind, ginger and spices wander in from the Indian side of my pantry, while pomegranate molasses and some of the warming spice combinations start flirting with Middle Eastern and North African flavors. Then I throw in oranges, fennel and sweet potatoes because apparently my Dutch oven does not recognize 
international borders.
It’s fusion food. Or culinary chaos. Either way, it’s delicious.
You can usually find tamarind paste or concentrate in Indian and Asian markets, larger supermarkets with a well-stocked international section, or online from Amazon. Just pay attention to what you’re buying because tamarind products vary considerably in concentration and added ingredients; a concentrated paste may be much stronger than a prepared tamarind sauce.
And What the Hell Is Pomegranate Molasses?
Despite the name, pomegranate molasses is not regular molasses that got dressed up for a trip to Morocco. It’s essentially pomegranate juice cooked down into a thick, intensely sweet-tart syrup, sometimes with added sugar, and it adds incredible depth to marinades, glazes and sauces. You can find Pomegranate Molasses on Amazon as well.
It also happens to be fantastic with tamarind because apparently one aggressively tangy ingredient wasn’t enough for me.
Together, the pomegranate molasses, tamarind paste, fresh orange juice, garlic, ginger and warming spices slowly reduce around the chicken into this sticky, citrusy, sweet-and-sour gravy. Add roasted fennel, red onions and sweet potatoes and you’ve got the kind of slow-roasted chicken thighs that make the whole motorhome smell like you’ve been cooking all day.
Which, technically, you have.
But after a day spent hiking beneath golden aspens, I’ll happily return to camp, pour a glass of wine and baste my Tamarind Chicken Thighs while the sun disappears behind the Eastern Sierra.
Pumpkin spice can have my coffee. Tamarind gets the Dutch oven.
Tamarind Chicken Thighs With Roasted Fennel: Not Your Basic Fall Chicken
I pound package of chicken thighs with skin
1 and a 1/2 teaspoons of fennel seeds
1 teaspoon salt
For the marinade
1 and cup of orange juice
1 cup of water
1/4 cup of pomegranate molasses
2 teaspoons freshly ground ginger
1/3 cup tamarind paste
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1/4 cup of honey
1 small red onion, sliced thin
3 bay leaves
1/4 cup adobe chilies
2 cinnamon sticks
5 dried red chilis
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 sweet potato, roasted in the oven for 40 minutes, cooled, skin removed and sliced into pieces
Crumbled goat cheese
Fennel leaves, for garnish
Preheat your oven to 400°F. Add the fennel seeds and salt to a NutriBullet or spice grinder and blitz until the fennel is finely ground into a fragrant fennel salt. Score the skin and meat of the chicken thighs with a few shallow cuts, then generously massage the fennel salt into those score marks. This gets all that savory, slightly licorice-like fennel flavor down into the chicken instead of merely sitting on top looking decorative.
Slice the red onions and scatter them across the bottom of a large glass baking dish along with the par-baked sweet potatoes, dried red chiles, bay leaves and cinnamon sticks. Nestle the chicken thighs over the vegetables, skin-side up, and roast at 400°F for about 25 minutes. This initial blast of higher heat gives your roasted chicken thighs a head start on developing that gorgeous golden skin before we turn down the temperature and let autumn dinner slowly do its thing.
Reduce the oven temperature to 275°F. Meanwhile, add the tamarind paste, orange juice, pomegranate molasses, garlic, ginger, vinegar, black peppercorns and mustard to a blender and blend until you have a smooth, sweet, tart and deeply savory sauce. This is where our basic chicken dinner officially becomes Tamarind Chicken Thighs and starts smelling like something far more exciting than Tuesday-night poultry.
Pour the tamarind mixture around and over the chicken, but try to keep most of that liquid off the skin so it has a fighting chance of staying crisp. Return the pan to the oven and slow-roast the chicken thighs for about 2½ hours, basting the meat and vegetables with the tamarind sauce every 30 minutes. Again, aim that glorious sauce underneath and around the chicken rather than repeatedly soaking the skin. Nobody asked for flabby chicken skin.
By the time your slow-roasted Tamarind Chicken Thighs are ready, the red onions and dried chiles should have practically melted into the cooking juices, creating a thick, sticky citrus-tamarind gravy scented with cinnamon, fennel, ginger and garlic. Spoon plenty of that sauce and those caramelized onions over the sweet potatoes and around each chicken thigh when serving. Dollop the crumbled goat cheese over the top. Add chopped fennel pieces to garnish. Dinner is served!
This tamarind chicken recipe is basically everything I want from a fall dinner: savory, sweet, tart, spicy and slow-roasted until the whole kitchen—or motorhome—smells incredible. Just add a glass of wine and pretend spending nearly three hours roasting chicken while camping still counts as roughing it.
