LEMONY CHICKEN AND POTATOES

I apologize for my very non creative title. But i'm on my 10th hour of a fifteen hour day, and I stayed up late last night to watch the finale of Project Runway, so my brain is a bit fried. But taking advantage of some of the spare time I have at work right now, I figured I'd write about the the chicken with roasted lemon and rosemary sauce that I made a few nights ago. I had chicken left over from the fried chicken that I had made, and potatoes from a boston organics order, plus thyme, so this recipe was perfect.

Now, there are a couple of chefs on foodtv that i always trust. One is Ina Garten and the other is Michael Chiarello. So here' s the ingredients below, courtesy or Mr. Chiarello.

5 large lemons
Gray salt
6 boneless chicken breast halves, skin on
Freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 1/2 pounds small new potatoes, such as red bliss, halved
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves
2 cups double-strength chicken stock, or 2 cups canned low-salt chicken broth boiled until reduced by half
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, optional
Rosemary sprigs, for garnish

The first thing you wanna do is cut the lemons in half broil them. I'd never done this before, so it was kinda interesting to see the results after about 15 minutes of broiling. The lemons come out super soft and kinda brown. So you're supposed to let them rest and then juice them over a strainer. So here's my warning, you gotta really let them cool cause if you try to juice the lemons when they're still hot, burning hot juice will come squirting out at you. I learned that the hard way.
Next, I browned the chicken thighs that I had left over from the chicken frying. It took about 5 minutes per side and those got place on the side for later. Next, using the same pan, I browned the potatoes which I had cut in half and seasoned with salt and pepper. This took about 15 minutes and they came out very pretty.

Then i rearranged the chicken thighs on top of the potatoes and stuck the whole thing in the oven for what was supposed to be 15 minutes at 425F. It actually ended up taking longer than that, cause the potatoes took longer to cook than the chicken. So i just removed the cook chicken and put it to the side until the potatoes were done cooking.

When the potatoes were finally done, i took those out of the oven and moved them onto a different dish. Then i finally started to work on the actual sauce. I tossed in garlic and olive oil into the pan from which i'd just removed the potatoes. Then i added in thyme (no rosemary), the chicken broth and the lemon juice. It was super super lemony. Which is why you toss in the butter, which helped cut the citrus a bit. And then you pour all the sauce over the chicken and potatoes. My final verdict on the whole dish? Those potatoes were great. I'm definitely doing that again. But the sauce? Just way too much lemon for me. If i ever make it again, I'd decrease the lemon and increase the chicken broth and it was certainly worth making so I could get all those extra ingredients used up. And if you wanna talk about the finale of Project Runway, give me a call.