Tag Archives: roast chicken

Roast Chicken with Garlic, Lime and Cranberry Onions

25 Oct

This is delicious, but it’s not a dieter’s delight. The onions and cranberries soak up all the tasty chicken fat that you would normally discard (or save for another use) after roasting the chicken.

Ingredients:

  • 8 to 12 chicken pieces (any combination)
  • 2 Tbs. olive oil
  • 2 Tbs. fresh minced garlic
  • 1 tsp. paprika
  • 1 tsp. kosher salt (ignore if using kosher chicken)
  • ½ tsp. fresh ground pepper or to taste
  • ¼ tsp. cayenne pepper
  • ½ tsp. dried thyme
  • 4 cups chopped onions
  • 1 cup dried cranberries
  • ¼ cup lime juice

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Spread the onions over the bottom of an oiled roasting pan.

Place the chicken pieces in a large bowl and rub with the olive oil, then the garlic. Combine the spices and rub all over the chicken pieces. Arrange the chicken skin side up over the onions and roast, uncovered, for 30 minutes.

Remove the chicken from the roasting pan and stir the cranberries into the onions. Place the chicken back in the pan, skin side down and roast for 10 minutes more.

Turn the chicken over again, drizzle with the lime juice, and roast for 20 to 30 minutes more, until the top is nicely browned.

Serve immediately with the chicken arranged on a serving platter on a bed of the cranberry onions.

Serves 6 to 8

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Miso chicken

7 Feb

chicken-miso

Here’s a nice and easy recipe that’s been in my “gotta try this” folder forever. I had a container of miso in my fridge forever as well, so it seemed like a good idea. I had yellow miso, not white, but I don’t think it makes a big difference. If you don’t have it, you can find it at an Asian grocery or online.

The recipe calls for chicken thighs, but I used a whole cut-up chicken. (Actually, I used only half a cut-up chicken, because there are only two of us, and halved the rest of the ingredients.)

These particular chicken pieces didn’t have a lot of fat, so I had to add a little water to the pan after about 20 or 30 minutes because the miso-margarine mixture was starting to burn.

The finished dish was very tasty. The miso and honey produced a an interesting and pleasant flavor — but it wasn’t too strong, so don’t be put off by the idea.

Ingredients:

4 Tbs. margarine, softened
½ cup white miso
2 Tbs. honey
1Tbs. rice vinegar (not seasoned)
Black pepper to taste
8 skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs, approx.. 2½ to 3 lb., or a whole chicken cut in eighths

Directions:

Heat oven to 425 degrees.

Combine margarine, honey, rice vinegar and black pepper in a large bowl and mix with a spatula or spoon until well combined.

Add the chicken to the bowl and massage the miso mixture all over it.

Place the chicken in a single layer in a roasting pan. Roast for 35 to 45 minutes, turning the chicken pieces over once or twice until the skin in golden brown and crisp. (You may need to add a little water to the pan if necessary part way through.)

Serves 4

 

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Honey Sriracha Chicken

19 Jan

chicken sriracha honey

Doesn’t this look scrumptious? There are a lot of marinade ingredients, and you have to plan ahead so the chicken can marinate at least two hours — overnight is better — but it’s really tasty and worth the bother. It’s a little like the Sweet & Spicy Roast Chicken recipe I posted in October — but different enough that I thought I’d tell you about this one today.

This dish has a somewhat Asian flavor, due to the Sriracha, soy sauce, garlic and ginger, and a little zing, but it’s not too spicy. If you  don’t like spice, add the little more honey. If you like it really zingy, add a little more Sriracha.

The original recipe (from the Detroit Free Press‘s 2015 recipe roundup) calls for cilantro. I didn’t have any cilantro, and we don’t like it much anyway, so I used parsley for the garnish. Cilantro would give it some added flavor.

Ingredients:

2 chicken breasts with skin and 2 wings or 4 chicken thighs *
2 cloves garlic, pressed
2 tsp. grated fresh ginger
1 Tbs. Sriracha hot sauce (or more or less to taste)
2 Tbs. soy sauce
1 Tbs. rice vinegar
1 Tbs. honey
1Tbs. brown sugar
1 Tbs. canola or vegetable oil
1 Tbs. cornstarch
½ cup chopped cilantro or parsley and/or 4 green onions, chopped, optional, for garnish

*double the marinade ingredients to cover a whole cut-up chicken

Directions:

Place the chicken in a sealable plastic bag.

Mix together the rest of the ingredients, except cilantro and green onions, in a small bowl. Pour over the chicken in the bag, seal the bag and marinate in the refrigerator for at least two hours or overnight.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Arrange the chicken pieces in a shallow baking dish. Bake about 30 to 45 minutes, basting occasionally, until chicken is thoroughly cooked.

Arrange on a platter and garnish with cilantro or parsley and/or green onions.

Serves 2

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Sweet and Spicy Roast Chicken

15 Oct

Chicken-Sweet&Spicy

I clipped this recipe from the New York Times about a month ago and made it for one of the recent holiday dinners.

New York Times recipes are never what you’d call easy, but this one is complicated only because you need to measure out a lot of ingredients. Simplify your life by getting all the ingredients ready the day before you want to serve the dish, and marinate the chicken overnight. The actual cooking is very easy.

I used a little less salt than the recipe calls for since I use kosher chicken, which retains some residual salt from the kashering process.

I’m not sure if you really have to go to the trouble of blanching the lemon slices; seems to me you could just throw them in with the marinade, especially if you’re letting the dish sit overnight. This is what I will probably do next time I make it, but his time I followed the directions.

I doubled the recipe — didn’t seem worth the effort to make the dish for just the two of us, and we were having company for the holiday. I had to use two gallon-size Ziploc bags to marinate everything, but it was easy enough to put one chicken in each bag with half the marinade and half the carrots.

The next morning, turn the chicken over in the bowl, or give the Ziploc bag a little squeeze and turn it upside down a few times to make sure everything is getting marinated evenly.

The original recipe said the chicken would take 20 to 30 minutes for the breasts to brown and 30 to 40 minutes for the legs and wings, and suggested removing the pieces as they got done. I found the roasting took a little longer — and I know from experience that chicken will brown much more nicely if you baste it a few times while it’s roasting.

Instead of spooning the carrots over the chicken, I decided to serve them separately — mainly because I didn’t have a large enough serving plate! The carrots worked well as a side dish.

Ingredients:

1 lemon
3 Tbs. lemon juice
3 Tbs. orange juice
4 Tbs. olive oil
1½ tsp. whole-grain spicy mustard
3 Tbs. honey
2½ Tbs. kosher salt
1 bay leaf
½ to 1 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes, to taste
Black pepper to taste
1 4-pound chicken, cut up
3 cups sliced carrots (¼-inch slices)
1 onion, halved and then thinly sliced
⅔ cup sliced dates
1 Tbs. fresh thyme leaves, or 1 tsp. dried thyme
¼ cup chopped cilantro or parsley, for garnish
2 scallions, thinly sliced, for garnish
¼ cup chopped toasted pistachios, for garnish

Directions:

Put a small pot of water on the stove to boil. Quarter the lemon lengthwise and remove any seeds. Thinkly slice crosswise into small wedges and add the lemon to the boiling water. Blanch for two minutes, then drain and cool.

In a saucepan, whisk together the lemon juice, orange juice, oil, mustard, honey, salt, bay leaf, red pepper flakes and black pepper. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 5 minutes. Cool.

Put the chicken into a large bowl or gallon-size Ziploc bag and add the cooled honey mixture. Add the carrots, onion, dates, thyme and lemon slices.

Turn the mixture several times to coat every piece of chicken. Marinate for at least 30 minutes at room temperature, but preferably overnight in the refrigerator.

Heat oven to 425 degrees (or 400 for convection). Transfer all ingredients, including marinade, to a large pan with a rim. The chicken should be skin-side-up in a single layer. Roast, basting a few times, until the chicken is browned and cooked through, about 45 minutes.

Remove the chicken and keep warm. Stir the carrots and continue roasting another 10 to 12 minutes.

Spoon the carrots over the chicken and top with the cilantro or parsley, sliced scallions and pistachios.

Serves 4 to 6

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Cheater’s Chicken Soup

10 Jan

Chicken Soup

(I’m posting this so soon after my last post by popular demand!)

Making chicken soup from scratch can be expensive (especially with kosher chicken). Making it from powdered soup mix is disgusting. Here’s a cheap and easy way to get home-made flavor!

Start by making roast chicken (see my post from January 9, 2013). After you remove the chicken from the roasting pan, pour the “juice” into a glass or plastic tub with a lid. Add a half-inch of water to the roasting pan and swish it around to deglaze the pan, then add that liquid to the tub. Cool a bit, cover and refrigerate. The fat will rise to the top and harden and you can scrape it off. (You can throw it out, or save it to use in place of margarine in cooking.)

Use the “juice” within a week or freeze it. It makes a great base for soup — enough for two. Add some cut-up carrot and/or celery, fresh or dried dill, salt and pepper and cook till the carrots are soft, then add cooked noodles and you’ve got a great chicken soup! Or use it as a base for another soup that calls for chicken or vegetable stock.

Want more soup? After you’ve carved up the roast chicken, freeze the carcass. When you’ve accumulated three or four carcasses, thaw them and place them in a large pot with a cut-up onion, a peeled, cut-up carrot, a stalk of celery and some fresh or dried dill. Bring to the boil and simmer, covered, for a few hours. Cool slightly, then strain in a colander lined with cheesecloth. Add salt and pepper to taste, and add any chicken “juice” (see above) that you’ve saved from roasting a chicken.

With three chicken carcasses, you can make more than a half-gallon of soup. If it tastes a little weak after you first strain it, cook it down a bit to concentrate the flavor. Or you can add a bit of powdered chicken stock to strengthen it — it won’t spoil the flavor.

Note: you can cook this soup a long time. Once I put it on the simmer burner at 6 p.m., planning to finish it at 9 when I returned from a meeting. Well, we both totally forgot about it until the next morning, so it had simmered more than 12 hours. No harm done – the soup was very flavorful.

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Roast Chicken

9 Jan

Roast ChickenThis is more a method than a recipe. The cooking time will depend on the size of the chicken. For a Cornish roasting hen – 2½ to 3 pounds – you’ll need 1½ to 2 hours. A proper roasting chicken of 5 or 6 pounds will take longer. The cooking time also depends on whether you use a regular oven or a convection oven. I recommend convection (my oven has a “convection roast” setting) because the cooking time is shorter and the chicken comes out juicier.

Rinse the chicken and shake it dry. Spray cooking spray on a roasting pan that is just a little bigger than the chicken and put the chicken in the pan while you preheat the oven to 350 degrees for convection and 375 degrees for a regular oven.

Sprinkle the chicken with garlic powder and rub a few tablespoons of zaatar over it. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, zaatar is a herb blend commonly used in Middle Eastern cooking. You can get it at Middle Eastern grocery stores or in well-stocked spice or bulk-food stores. If all else fails, order it online. (It’s great on pita and in scrambled eggs too!)

If you can’t find zaatar or don’t like it, you can use another herb blend or a little paprika.

The key to getting a juicy, nicely browned bird is to baste it frequently. Baste after the first half-hour and then every 15-20 minutes.

You will know it’s done when a) the bird is nicely browned b) the drumstick feels loose when you wiggle it and c) the juices that run out of the cavity are brown, not red. You can also prick the chicken in the thickest part of the thigh to see if the juices are running clear – but I prefer not to because I’d rather keep those juices in the chicken! When the chicken s done, remove to a platter and let it rest about 15 minutes before you carve it. Cut off the wings, drumsticks, thighs and breast meat, but leave the carcass intact. You’ll use it for chicken soup, which I’ll write about in my next post.

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