Aji-Amarillo Coconut Milk Chicken

So we made this very delicious braised chicken for Sunday night dinner. Goes with a recent theme of exploring bone-in skin-on thighs, crisped in a heavy pan/pot, and then baked to perfection with a (hopefully) still crispy skin crust.

Started with this recipe:
https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2017/12/braised-chicken-aji-amarillo-coconut-milk-recipe.html

with these modifications:

• I used our large oval dutch oven for this but I think it would have been OK in a smaller pot, try the 5 quart dutch oven next time.
• Ended up being a lot of coconut oil, I think we could reduce it to 1 TBSP since we get a lot of oil from the chicken fat being rendered.
• Our Aji Amarillo paste is pretty hot so we were nervous to put the 1/4-1/2 cup noted on the recipe. We used 1 TBSP blended with 1/2 a yellow bell pepper (fire-roasted on the gas stove). When mixed with the coconut milk, there was almost no heat at all and the flavor was mostly of coconut milk, so next time we will probably go 2-3 TBSP and a whole fire-roasted bell pep.
• The sauce was a little thinner than we would have liked. We might simmer the sauce a bit longer in step 3 (before adding the sweet potato/squash) to concentrate it a bit before continuing with the recipe.  We thought this is better than adding a thickener because we want to increase the flavor as well.
• It's springtime so we didn't have access to butternut squash. No problem, swapped for a large sweet potato which worked great.
• We chose to eat this over asian-style steamed rice, yum! Even Nadia gobbled it up (sort of).

Pictures: