Chicken Chorizo Hash

So what to do, what to do, with all this leftover chicken all the time? Here's a great answer for a totally new meal when you've just had too much plain, boring chicken, whether it's leftover from Shabbos, or was on sale, or whatever. I am trying out a new product called Jack's Gourmet, (OU Glatt), which at the moment is available at Glatt Express in Teaneck. They have a spicy Mexican-style chorizo sausage, which is just delicious and perfectly suited to hash. I made this with extra virgin olive oil, so the (considerable amount of) fat in the four sausages and whatever fat remained on the skin-free chicken is the only fat present in the recipe. However, lower fat meat items can also be used to make this recipe even healthier. You can do it with only the chicken, but it's a little boring. The chorizo really is the star here. An alternative to lower the fat content of the dish is to slice and fry up the sausages first, and pour off the expressed oil and/or pat the sausages dry with paper toweling.

Hash basically means a coarse mixture of ingredients cooked with spices, and to me it usually is characterized by a meat product like corned beef, or sausage, cooked with potatoes and onions. It's a great choice if you want to do a meat meal for Motzei Shabbos, or when you feel like a home-cooked meal but don't want to make a lot of effort. All you really have to do is dice up an onion and a potato, throw it in and forget about it until it perfumes up your house. Then you sing, "Dinner's ready!"

Ingredients:

1-2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion, cut into rings
4 cloves fresh garlic, minced, or 2 tsp granulated garlic
2 large Yukon Gold or baking potatoes, diced into 1/2 inch chunks
1 cup carrots, diced
6 cooked bone-in chicken thighs, skin and fat removed and diced into bite-sized pieces (or any leftover chicken)
1 package sausage, diced on the bias (I recommend Jack's GourmetSpicy Mexican-Style Chorizo)
2 tsp smoked paprika
1-2 tsp coarse ground kosher salt (to taste)
freshly ground cracked pepper (to taste)

Procedure:

Sweat onion over medium heat in hot olive oil until caramelized to a dark brown color (approximately 10 minutes). Add the garlic and the diced chorizo and cook together for another ten minutes. Now add diced chicken and potatoes, cover and cook over low to medium heat for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and serve, or place on a back burner under very low heat for one to two hours, until ready to serve. The longer it cooks, the more the flavors will marry. The hash is also easily cooked in advance, refrigerated and reheated. Serve hot!