Lentil and Chicken Stew

This recipe came out of someone recommending a pressure cooker to me. I of course looked online for recipes to try and found Quick and Easy Pressure Cooker Chicken, Lentil, and Bacon Stew With Carrots Recipe. It looked good and I generally trust Serious Eats as a good source of recipes. (Note that you do not need a pressure cooker to make this recipe, it probably just cuts about ~30 minutes off the cooking time).

Now this recipe is already pretty easy, but with a few tweaks I was able to make it even simpler. See the ingredients below.

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
8 ounces thick cut bacon, cut into 1/2" chunks
1 medium onion, diced
4 medium carrots, washed and cut into 1/2" chunks
8 ounces dried green or brown lentils
12 sprigs parsley, leaves roughly chopped, stems left whole
2 bay leaves
1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs
1 quart low-sodium chicken stock/broth
1/2 bunch kale, roughly chopped, discarded any really thick stems
1/2 bag frozen peas
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons vinegar (they call for sherry, but I only had apple cider so that is what I used)

So you can already see that I simplified by just calling for regular thick cut bacon vs slab bacon, doubled the amount of carrots (and just washed them instead of peeling), added kale and peas (Needs to have a good amount of veggies to be a complete meal in my house), and using boneless skinless chicken thighs. Also note that I doubled the recipe when I made it so I just used a whole bunch of kale and a bag of peas (Works great as leftovers). So these are all the shortcuts that I took and think you probably could take without really altering the original flavor of the recipe too much. The only thing you could probably do is leave out the parsley sprigs, but you already have them so why not throw them in. They aren't too hard to pick out later.

Directions

1. Put a large pot (or pressure cooker) on medium high and add the olive oil and bacon. Cook for a couple minutes until it starts to brown.
2. While bacon is browning, chop the onion and add to the pot. Cook for a couple more minutes until the onion starts to turn translucent.
3. While onion is cooking, wash and cut the carrots. Add carrots to the pot along with the lentils, parsley stems, bay leaves, chicken thighs (I didn't trim these at all) and stock.
4. Give it a good stir and turn the heat up to high to bring it up to a simmer and then back down to low and simmer for 40-50 minutes until lentils are cooked and chicken comes apart easily. If using a pressure cooker just follow the directions for your cooker and cook on high for 15 minutes.
5. Remove parsley stems and bay leaves, while removing break up the chicken against the side of the pot. You can leave the chicken as big or small as you like. I left it kind of chunky.
6. Toss in kale and peas and let cook for 5 minutes.
7. Add vinegar and taste and adjust salt and pepper until its the way you like it.

And that's it. Relatively easy and it made about ~5 quarts of stew since I doubled the recipe.

Get the recipe here