Arroz con pollo

Arroz con pollo is one of those dishes I try out because it sounded tasty in a cookbook but I don't know if the recipe is authentic and if how it turns out is how it's "supposed" to turn out because I haven't actually eaten it before. I always worry about this a great deal, but ultimately, my most important factor of course has to be--does it taste good? (Unless I was trying to make and serve a dish to someone very experienced in eating it or making it, like say they grew up eating their grandmother's arroz con pollo, in which case, I'd probably be too intimidated to mess with that and end up making them Chinese food or something...)

This recipe, which I got from "How to Cook Everything," is delicious. There were two versions, basically a very stripped down, basic recipe, and a "deluxe" sort of recipe. I made a version somewhere in between the two and loved how it turned out, but would love to try the stripped down version as well. I think the key factor is the fact that the rice cooks in a tasty sauce--along with the chicken--how convenient can you get? The delicious byproduct is that the rice absorbs the flavors of the tasty broth and any vegetables you include, not to mention the chicken itself. Not just the chicken broth, but some of the chicken fat also gets absorbed into the rice as the fat renders. You end up with really chickeny rice, which is also pleasingly yellow thanks to a bit of saffron or turmeric. There is a Chinese chicken and rice dish which also works on the principle of the chicken flavor absorbing into the rice for maximum tastiness...I'll be trying that one out sometime too, of course.