Recipe in Progress: Chicken with Almonds and Honey

For Christmas, I was lucky to get The New Book of Middle Eastern Food from Scotti. So I set to work to try some of the recipes! I was particularly excited about the recipe for chicken with almonds and honey, which was supposed to melt in your mouth. Megan, the vegetarian, complained that she would have nothing to eat, so I paired it with couscous with roasted pine nuts (from the box), and Spinach with Raisins and Pine Nuts (another recipe from the box).

So, the chicken recipe was pretty involved. First you boil it in a big vat of spices on the stove, then you braise it in the oven. It turned out pretty good, but the recipe confused me. I'm not sure I did it right. You are supposed to pour all of the cooking liquid into the braising pan... but if you do that, you have way too much to even fit! Then you are supposed to coat the chicken in this almond/honey/rosewater paste that will crust up in the oven. Don't even ask how long it took me to find rosewater. The problem is, the crust comes right off in the cooking liquid! So only the tops of the tallest chicken pieces ended up with a crust (you can kind of see it in this picture), which was good and all. But then the crust disappears as the chicken pieces move around in the pan when you are serving them. This is the kind of thing that makes you wish you had a cooking teacher in the room with you! Any ideas?

The spinach with raisins and pine nuts turned out very well, in my opinion. And the couscous too! Even though it did come from a box.

-Kristin