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The Brilliant 4-Ingredient Chicken Dinner I Make When I Don’t Feel Like Cooking (Almost Every Week)

Lindsay Funston
Lindsay FunstonEditor-in-Chief at The Kitchn
I never wanted to work in food, but when I got placed as the food team intern at Real Simple magazine as a new college grad, I knew it was a better fit than fashion or beauty. I didn't really know how to cook, but I loved to eat, and the idea of writing about food seemed fun — who doesn't love it? I moved on to work as an editor at Martha Stewart's Whole Living (RIP) and Oprah magazine (RIP) before saying farewell to print magazines and joining the founding team at Delish, where I fell totally in love with producing food content for the internet. Over the years, I've traveled the country hosting my own video series, written cookbooks, and developed hundreds of viral recipes, including the now-famous Marry Me Chicken (yup, that's me!). I love helping readers (and all of my friends!) figure out easy but still wildly delicious things to cook for dinner, a holiday brunch, a weekend picnic, you name it. Sometimes all you need is a home-cooked meal to turn around a bad day.
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published Aug 9, 2024
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overhead shot of three harissa orange chicken thighs in a small white baking dish.
Credit: Photo: Alex Lepe ; Food Stylist: Kelli Foster

We create a lot of chicken recipes over at The Kitchn. It’s a reliable, affordable protein most of our families can get behind, and there are seemingly endless ways to flavor it, cut it, and cook it. (Case in point: We’re newly onto “chicken bites” over here, whether you take yours flavored with garlic parm or French onion.) So I get ridiculously overjoyed when there’s a recipe that’s brilliant enough in its conception that it sticks out from the flock (had to) of other chicken dinners.

Get the recipe: Harissa Orange Chicken Thighs

Harissa Orange Chicken is that recipe for me. We published this recipe in January — when all of us had the postholiday blues and were trying to get back into the day-to-day routine of cooking dinner and not baking cookies or mixing a festive cocktail on a Wednesday — and were instantly delighted. Not only was this exactly what The Kitchn readers needed in that moment, it was also what we all needed: a recipe so easy it was impossible not to cook it, and one that called for an ingredient combination that felt fresh and different. I was all in — and I’ve never looked back.

Credit: Photo: Alex Lepe ; Food Stylist: Kelli Foster

The recipe calls for making a marinade with orange zest, harissa paste, olive oil, honey, and salt, then slathering that all over bone-in skin-on chicken thighs — get as much under the skin as you can — and placing the chicken in a baking dish on top of freshly squeezed juice from that orange you zested. The chicken bakes in the juice, taking on its flavor, while the marinade soaks into the chicken and gets nice and glazed thanks to the honey.

The resulting flavor of this chicken is so unexpected and delicious I go in phases when I make this recipe once a week (I’m telling you, it’s too easy not to make); right now I’m on more of a once-a-month cycle. I love serving this with anything that guarantees you can sop up the sauce: roasted potatoes, rice, bread. If you’re someone who cooks a lot of chicken, this is likely just the new inspiration you need. 


Get the recipe: Harissa Orange Chicken Thighs

This article originally published on The Kitchn. See it there: The Brilliant 4-Ingredient Chicken Dinner I Make When I Don’t Feel Like Cooking (Almost Every Week)