Chicken in Green Pipian Sauce

Chicken cooked in a Mexican sauce made with pepitas (pumpkin seeds), tomatillos and chile peppers.

I grow tomatillos in my garden. Actually, I don’t even bother to plant seeds anymore. The plants come up like weeds. I harvest them by cooking them down and freezing them. This time of year, I am always looking for recipes that use tomatillos, so when someone asked about the “Pipian Chicken recipe,” I was happy to make it and use up some of the tomatillos I’ve harvested! If you don’t have any on hand, tomatillos in the can will work just fine. Tomatillos are not green tomatoes, although they are in the same family. They have a wonderful, lemony flavor that I really like.

Myra loved Doña María® jars of sauce. She used the Doña María® Mole for Red Bean Mole. We are going to use the Mole Pipian in this chicken recipe. Get the Mole in the jar, not in the ready to serve package (it has other ingredients that you don’t want).

This is a very versatile sauce! You can cut up a whole raw chicken and cook it in the Pipian sauce or use pre-cooked chicken and heat it until everything is hot. It is always served over rice in Mexico. I used raw boneless chicken thighs, which made it really easy and quick to cook, once you have the sauce. In the restaurant, Myra always boiled a couple of chickens and picked the meat from the bones. When someone ordered this dish, she would add the cooked chicken to the sauce, heat it all up and serve it over brown rice.

This recipe makes a quart of sauce. Myra’s notes say this is for one whole chicken. If you have sauce left over, freeze it for another time! I think it would be good over a white fish. James says pork chops. It could even be vegetarian, if you use veggie broth!