Balsamic Chicken Drumettes

Feeling like I haven't made anything new in awhile, I started looking around online for a new recipe yesterday. My search eventually lead me to the Food Network site where I looked at the most popular recipes for Bobby Flay and Giada de Laurentiis. Not even the top 20, but the top 40 most popular recipes for both chefs were ALL chicken! All of them! Do people eat that much chicken? I don't make chicken very often mostly because I don't have the patience to cook it. It takes so much longer than steak and fish. Medium rare steak or tuna, delicious. Medium rare chicken, not so much. Anyway, I found this Giada recipe that I remembered I had seen awhile ago and wanted to make, but never got around to it. Here goes.

1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup soy sauce
5 sprigs of rosemary
5 garlic cloves, halved
10 to 12 chicken drumsticks
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Combine the balsamic, honey, brown sugar, soy sauce, rosemary sprigs, and garlic cloves, in a large, re-sealable plastic bag. Shake and squeeze the contents of the bag to dissolve the honey and the brown sugar. Add the chicken drumsticks to the bag and seal with as little air as possible in the bag. Place in the refrigerator and marinate for 2 hours.



Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

Place the chicken drumsticks on a foil-lined baking sheet. Bake until the skin is caramelized and very dark in spots, about 30 to 35 minutes.




Meanwhile, place the marinade in a small saucepan. Bring the marinade to a boil (in order to kill bacteria). Reduce the heat to simmer and cook over low heat until thick, about 15 minutes. Reserve.



Use a pastry brush to brush some of the cooked marinade on the cooked chicken. Place the chicken on a serving platter. Sprinkle with the sesame seeds and the chopped parsley.



I used black sesame seeds so they're a little harder to see, but they're there. Yum! The chicken was really good. Sweet and flavorful. The honey, brown sugar, balsamic, and soy sauce worked so well together, and brushing more of the marinade over the cooked chicken really made it perfect. I actually only marinated it for about an hour and 15 minutes and it was fine since I brushed more on at the end, but I would have liked to go the whole 2 hours. Oh, and the chicken drumsticks were very inexpensive - at $2.49/lb, I bought 10 which was about 1 3/4 lbs so it cost around $4.50. Doesn't get much better than that.

One more thing. I would be remiss if I didn't share this picture. How beautiful are these tomatoes from Scheeringa Farms?