Torts & Tarts: Lemon Roasted Chicken

Hello again! I'm back from another long hiatus. In my defense, I've been quite busy lately. First of all, I GRADUATED (woowoowoo!). Accordingly, I was kept busy with a lot of dinners, and parties, and dinner parties, and graduation parties, and let's-party-for-no-specific-reason parties, and somewhere in there I did a ton of work to ensure I actually graduated. In addition, there was a little bedbug situation in my apartment (I <3 NYC...) that had to be dealt with. So not much cooking has been done recently, in part because 99% of my belongings were trapped in giant plastic bags while my apartment was treated. On a related note, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the general public for wearing the same three outfits repeatedly for the last two months.

At any rate, I've finally moved out of the old apartment and will be spending the summer studying for the bar exam at my parents' house. This is horrible news for me but excellent news for this blog because I have never had such a strong motivation to procrastinate in my entire life. Also, my parents seem willing to accept home-cooked meals in lieu of rent, which fits perfectly into my (non-existent) budget.

I reverted to being vegetarian recently (my temporary dalliance with animal proteins died a sudden and painful death brought on by a late night viewing of Food, Inc.), but yesterday was my Dad's birthday and he's the sort of guy who believes if a meal doesn't have meat, it's not actually a meal. (And if it doesn't have red meat, then it's a "healthy" meal.) So I made an exception for him and made this lemon roasted chicken. Since it met Dad's definition of "healthy," we were all able to eat copious amounts of birthday cake afterwards.

The recipe calls for boneless chicken breasts with the skin still on, which I had to custom order from the butcher at our local grocery store, who somehow interpreted my request for "4 chicken breasts" as "the breasts of 4 chickens," meaning not days after deciding to be vegetarian I walked out of the grocery store with the single largest purchase of meat I have ever made in my entire life. Lovely. But I'm told it was yummy.

Lemon Roasted Chicken

Adapted from the Barefoot Contessa

Ingredients:

4 chicken breasts, boneless, with skin
1/4 cup olive oil
1 small onion (the original recipe calls for 3 tbsp of minced garlic)
1/3 cup dry white wine
zest of 2 lemons
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1.5 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp minced fresh thyme leaves
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 lemon

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mince the onion into small pieces. Warm the olive oil in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Add onion (or garlic) and cook for a couple of minutes (do NOT let it brown).

Remove saucepan from heat and add wine, oregano, thyme, lemon zest, lemon juice, and 1 tsp. kosher salt. Stir gently until combined.

Pour the sauce into a 9 x 12 baking dish.

Place the chicken, skin side up, on top of the sauce. Brush with olive oil and sprinkle generously with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Cut the remaining lemon into wedges and stick the wedges in with the chicken. Place the baking dish in the oven and cook for 30-40 minutes until the chicken is done. The skin should be nicely browned- if it is not, stick the pan under the broiler for a couple of minutes.