Orchard News and Chews

Maple Mustard Chicken

Posted on March 7, 2018 Updated on March 29, 2018

Can you believe that we are nearing the one year anniversary mark for my blog? Yeah, me neither. I kicked it off with a post about a Waterloo regional specialty, Egg Cheese, which is nearly always eaten with maple syrup, and boy, oh boy, did that stir up the yeas and the nays! I got a 2 litre carton of buttermilk last week in preparation for making it again soon. Our grocery store had the big jugs on sale last week. It’s like they know that it’s Egg Cheese season!

There is no denying that March is the Month of Maple in Ontario. Everywhere you look, there is maple this and maple that. I happen to like maple syrup too and we are rather closely connected to a certain young maple syrup producer, so in the interest of self-preservation and for the good of mankind, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and contribute my two cents.

I have fond memories of traipsing through our bush behind our place, collecting sap after school. At least they’re fond memories now. We didn’t have a farm, but we did live in the country and Mom and Dad wanted us to know where our food came from. Dad built a cute little sugar shanty at the back of our lawn, and many were the evenings we would spend out there in that warm steamy darkness, the kerosene lamp softly hissing above us. Drinking freshly gathered sap, watching it boil and skimming off the foam, opening the furnace door to add more logs to the fire, listening to Dad telling stories about his childhood: what a sticky feast for the senses. And sometimes… oh bliss, oh joy… sometimes, we took a jar of it in to Mom and she would pour it into a kettle on the stove and carefully boil it down further to the taffy stage. When it was done, she poured it into well-buttered enamel pie plates and let it cool. We waited impatiently until it had hardened enough that we could swirl it on our forks like sticky spaghetti and take that first marvelous bite. We would pop popcorn and wash apples to eat with it, because the best snack combination ever is popcorn, taffy, and apples!

I thought it was time to feature a meat entree again, so I cobbled together a simple, yet highly flavoured glaze for chicken. It would be delicious on pork chops as well, or perhaps on your Easter ham. I used bone-in chicken breasts that I had in my freezer, so they took a little longer to bake than boneless ones would have, but wow, were they tender! I served them with mashed potatoes, brown butter rutabaga, and a simple salad on my nice plates because I was going to be taking a picture of them. And we saw and tasted that it was good.

The glaze ingredients

A savoury trio; grainy mustard, shallot, and maple syrup.

Chicken breasts coated with glaze and ready for baking.

Baked and succulent

Treat your special someone to a delectable dinner of Maple Mustard Chicken, mashed potatoes, rutabaga with brown butter, and a salad.

This post is sponsored by Martin’s Family Fruit Farm. The recipes, views, and stories are my own.
Depending on the amount of natural sugar in the sap, it takes from thirty-eight to forty gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup. It is boiled in evaporator pans until it condenses and becomes thick and golden. There are four grades of syrup in Ontario: Golden, Amber, Dark and Very Dark, which is mostly sold directly to bakeries. We sell the first three grades at Martin’s. It has been interesting to watch the transition from the earlier desired grade being a lighter syrup to now, where most people desire the Amber, or even the Dark. I guess people enjoy more robust foods than they used to!
I used a shallot in this recipe. Shallots look like mini oval red onions, and the taste is somewhere between a onion and a garlic. It is adds wonderful depth of flavour to roast beef and other meat dishes, as well as to roasted vegetables.