lemon chicken – Blue Kitchen

Roast Chicken with Potatoes, Lemons and Capers makes a flavorful, beautiful one-pot meal when paired with a salad. Recipe below.

Recipe ideas can come from just about anywhere. This one began with a comment by Laura over at What I Like on last week’s Meyer Lemon Pizza with Goat Cheese and Bacon recipe. She said, in part, “I love roasted lemons.” I’d never thought of roasting lemons before, but suddenly synapses were firing, and I was picturing roasting little red potatoes with lemons and rosemary. Then I remembered the whole chicken lurking uncooked in the fridge, and things just kind of snowballed.

I love this kind of cooking. As much as I also love poring over cookbooks, magazines and the daily bombardment of Internet food for inspiration, there’s something exciting about starting with the simplest idea (roasted lemons, in this case) and turning it into a meal. Continue reading “Simply inspired: Roast Chicken with Potatoes, Lemons and Capers” →

Lemons, garlic, honey and thyme bring a lively flavor to the table quickly, for a delicious weeknight dinner. Sticky Lemon Chicken recipe below.

When children are very young, their first experiences of playing with other children are actually playing next to other children. They don’t truly interact with one another, but for them, playing side-by-side is the beginning of their social lives. There’s a school of thought in cooking that mirrors this experience, the idea that putting ingredients next to one another actually achieves some meaningful interaction among them.

You know what I mean—recipes that include instructions like “lay sprigs of rosemary around the roast” or “place a whole peeled apple in the chicken cavity”… Or my favorite, recipes that instruct you to rub lamb chops, steaks, slices of baguette or anything with a cut clove of garlic. In my experience, this technique is a perfect way to waste a clove of garlic and five or so minutes of your life. It adds nothing to the flavor of anything, so far as I can tell. Ingredients have to fully commit to a dish and mix it up with the others to have an impact on the final taste.

So alarm bells should have been going off in my head when I read the Sticky Lemon Chicken recipe in Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food. It called for putting sprigs of thyme, slices of lemon and a head of garlic cut in half into the pan along with the chicken. And for seasoning the chicken itself only with salt and pepper. But this was Gordon-bleeping-Ramsay, almost as famous for exquisite cooking as he is for his expletive-laced tirades at anyone unlucky enough to cross his path in the kitchen. I told myself it would be okay. Continue reading “Fowl-mouthed inspiration: Riffing on Gordon Ramsay’s Sticky Lemon Chicken” →