Roast Chicken with Lemon and Rosemary Roast Potatoes

I am a huge foodaholic and miss watching the food network channel, miss watching Emeril saying “bam/feel the love” whenever he adds an ingredient into a dish, or watching Barefoot Contessa add huge globs of butter into nearly everything and let’s not forget Paula Deen who is a chef that every person wants in their own kitchen.

While living in Europe I discovered another fabulous chef, not American but English this time. I remember standing in a bookshop briefly browsing through magazines when I came across Jamie Oliver – his magazine was of great quality and the freshness of the paper really impressed me, as if I was opening a new book for the first time. The recipes and pictures were out of this world and 45z later (which is a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a magazine -an English book cost 45z and who in there right mind pays that much for a magazine) I walked out feeling as if I had just won the lottery. One magazine led to another and before I knew it, I had purchased a two year subscription and am currently the proud owner of eight marvelous magazines.

Recently I came to the conclusion that I would like to do more than just look at my lovely cookbooks and magazines, so I have decided that I’m going to start a little project. Every week I’ll pick a recipe, either from my books/magazines or simply find one on the Internet. My aim is to cook something that I’ve never cooked before and write about the experience…regardless of whether the outcome is good or bad.

I began my journey yesterday and was tremendously pleased with the outcome. I ended up cooking Jamie Oliver’s Roast Chicken with Lemon and Rosemary Roast Potatoes and to put it in a nice way, we all ate like kings. The recipe itself was pretty easy to follow and I’m happy to announce that there were no mess-ups along the way.

Step one was seasoning a 2kg chicken and leaving it to marinate overnight in the fridge. Touching/prepping a whole chicken is not what I call enjoyment but someone had to do it. The following afternoon the chicken baked for 45 minutes. While the chicken was baking, next came the potatoes which were very easy to prepare because I simply had to parboil them with a whole bulp of garlic and a lemon. After my potatoes were cooked, I removed the lemon and carefully stabbed it ten times (have you ever held a lemon after it has boiled in hot water, well for one its hot and two it was light, as if I was holding a water balloon. I really wasn’t expecting that) before putting the lemon, garlic and some thyme into the cavity of the chicken. I then took the potatoes, some fresh vegetables and lay them around the chicken and sprinkled some fresh rosemary. Before returning the chicken/potatoes back into the oven, I laid some sliced bacon on top of the breast and further cooked everything for another 45 minutes.

While everything was baking, I decided to cook two small side dishes. I sliced up some carrots, cooked them in some salted water and served them with butter and parsley. I also made my favorite zucchini dish, which simply consists of slicing zucchini into thin slices, dipping them into an egg batter and breadcrumbs, lightly frying them on each side and shredding some parmesan on top. This zucchini is heaven in your mouth, it really is.

As my chicken was hitting the 45 minute mark, my mother arrived and I slowly started panicking mainly because the chicken wasn’t quite fully cooked yet (I had this perfect picture of how I wanted everything to look)  and I also wanted to impress not only my mother but also my friends.  Fifteen minutes later, everything was cooked and we all sat down for a lovely meal. The chicken was roasted to perfection, the skin was crispy and the insides were juicy. The potatoes were crispy, the garlic was sweet and rosemary gave it all some extra oomph. You know a recipe is great when everyone wants seconds and "flight" to see who can find the last piece of crispy bacon.