1 Delicious Dish & I'm Not Talking Gossip

Last year it was in all the magazines: engagement chicken. Anecdotal evidence was strong. Many a girl had whipped up this roasted chicken  for her fella and emerged, shortly thereafter, with a ring on her finger. I, too, have been making engagement chicken for many years. It hasn’t netted me an engagement (my own sparkling personality did that), but it has resulted in many a compliment from my crew of picky eaters. 

My roasted chicken recipe is probably from Barefoot Contessa. I love her and all her cookbooks. I don’t own any of them because my mother owns all of them, and half-assed cooks like me always prefer to call their mothers on the phone and require them to verbally share the long list of ingredients. This practice both gets me the recipe and counts as a weekly phone call. Win-win! (Kidding, mom, kidding.)

So I’m not totally sure it’s from Barefoot Contessa because the recipe is scrawled in my recipe notebook. But it probably is because the recipe’s really good and really hard to screw up (which are hallmarks of pretty much all Contessa dishes).

The only caveat to this recipe is that you have to be home for 2 or 3 hours while your chicken roasts. This makes it a perfect Sunday night dish. Also, you need to have a really deep pan to make it in because it results in a TON of food. We’re talking 3 dishes in one: chicken, potatoes & carrots. In – have I mentioned? – one pan. Genius!

Ingredients:

-       One whole fryer OR one whole roasting chicken

-        1 lemon

-       A big old jug of chicken broth

-       A giant bag of mini carrots

-       A bag of little, red potatoes (or really any color potatoes, but they should be on the small side)

-       3 yellow onions

-       Fresh sage

 

Preparation:

-       Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

1.     Stuff lemon (which you’ve quartered) and sage inside chicken.

2.    Place chicken in giant, roasting pan.

3.    Dump carrots and potatoes (which you’ve sliced into smaller pieces) into roasting pan.

4.    Dump onions, which you’ve cut up, into pan too.

5.    Dump chicken broth on top of vegetables.

6.    Brush olive oil over top of chicken.

7.    Make sure the chicken is positioned correctly in the pan. The little chicken legs should be on the top. Envision your dog cashed out on his back with his paws in the air. This is what your chicken should look like in the pan.

8.    Bake your concoction. Fryer chickens take less time, around 2 or 2 ½ hours. Roasting chickens take longer, say, 3 hours.

9.    Check with a meat thermometer, and if necessary crank your oven up to 400 degrees to get it done. 

Make it for your fella or your roommate or yourself this weekend and get ready for the compliments and/or diamond rings to roll in!