Chicken with thyme and lemon and smashed garlic potatoes
Very simple but very pretty, especially if you can get your hands on thyme flowers. The chicken also works well with lavender.
The potatoes are fab. I do them in all sorts of versions. You can daub the top of them with crème fraîche (wicked, but good) or add dried chilli flakes or herbs (not to serve with this chicken dish, but with others). It’s a ‘keeper’ recipe.
Ingrediënten
FOR THE POTATOES
- 500 g 1lb 2oz baby waxy potatoes
- 8 garlic cloves peeled but left whole, plus 3 garlic cloves, grated
- 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- salt and pepper
- leaves from 2 sprigs of thyme
FOR THE CHICKEN
- 1 small skin-on chicken jointed into 8, or a mixture of skin-on bone-in joints
- 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 8 sprigs of thyme and thyme flowers if possible
- finely grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon plus the juice of 2
Instructies
- Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/gas mark 5.
- Boil the potatoes in water with the peeled, whole garlic cloves.
- When the potatoes are just tender, drain them (discard the garlic), put the potatoes into an ovenproof dish and press the top of each so it is a little crushed, but stays in one piece (I use the end of a rolling pin, but a potato masher is good, too).
- Add the grated garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and turn the potatoes over in all this.
- Sprinkle with the thyme.
- Put the chicken joints into an ovenproof dish that you can serve from; a cast-iron, enamel or copper dish would be good.
- They should be able to lie snugly in a single layer.
- Add the olive oil, salt and pepper and 6 sprigs of thyme (leave some sprigs whole, just use the leaves of others.
- No need to be exacting about it).
- Add the zest and juice of one lemon.
- Throw the squeezed-out shells in too.
- Toss everything around with your hands.
- Remove some of the zest of the other lemon with a vegetable peeler and set it aside.
- Leave all the chicken skin side up and put in the hot oven.
- After 10 minutes’ cooking, put the potatoes into the oven.
- They should be roasted for 30 minutes and you need to shake the dish every so often and turn the potatoes over.
- After the chicken has been in the oven for 30 minutes, add the strips of lemon zest and toss them round in the fat.
- Cook for a final 10 minutes.
- Serve the chicken in the dish in which it has been cooked with the leaves from the extra sprigs of thyme and the thyme flowers over the top, with the potatoes.
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