Hi, Foodies in the Hive!
I hope you're having a nice weekend 😁
Some of my friends think baked goods are the best, but they rarely bake anything at home. How about you? How often do you bake at home?
For me, the oven is essential in my kitchen; baked vegetables and meats concentrate their flavor and usually, depending on the method of preparation, they acquire a tender inside and crispy outside texture that everyone seems to love.
When life gives you lemons...
...you may want to bake chicken like this 😋
This is a quick baked chicken recipe that doesn't require you to marinate the chicken ahead of time. So if you do like me and keep the cleaned and de-pressed chicken in the freezer, you can prepare it in less than half an hour and then the oven will do the rest of the work for you.
INGREDIENTS
- 4 chicken leg quarters (1 kg)
- 2 cups julienned onion
- 3 cups sliced potatoes
- 100 ml freshly squeezed lemon juice
- 1 teaspoon lemon zest
- 1 spoonful dry rosemary
- 1 handful capers
- 2 tablespoons freshly crushed garlic
- freshly cracked black pepper to taste
- olive oil to taste
- salt to taste
THE PROCESS
This chicken is baked with a side of potatoes and onions, so you can serve it alone or with a light salad and you'll have a well rounded and tasty meal. The chicken will be flavorful and tender on the inside and golden brown, even a little crispy, on the outside.
I chose a pyrex that would fit in my small electric oven and into which I could fit everything and greased it with enough olive oil.
This pyrex measures approximately 28x18x7cm.
Then I distributed the onion juliennes as evenly as I could. They would release water and help keep the potato slices from sticking to the pyrex bottom.
And cut the potatoes into slices; I cut them beveled to prevent them from breaking when handling the chicken after the first hour of cooking and also to be able to serve them without any problem.
I added salt and scrambled them a little. The bed of onion and potato was now ready for the chicken.
As I said before, I didn't need to marinate the chicken.
I started by making a "paste" with the capers, garlic cloves, and dry rosmery; and then I added the lemon juice.
I did not add salt as the capers were quite salty from the brine. I even had to wash them a little and squeeze them.
I rubbed the chicken leg qarters well.
All the pieces were immediately into the pyrex.
As you can see, I left the skin on and made a few shallow cuts to help the quick marinade season the meat.
TIP:
Over the years, I have learned that lemon chicken is very tasty as long as we leave the chicken with the skin on. Otherwise, the meat will not be juicy. So my amateur advice is that if you want this recipe to turn out great, you should leave the skin on the chicken. I remove only the excess skin, so it won't be greasy.
It was time to add some freshly cracked black pepper.
And it was ready to go into my little electric oven for an hour and a half at 300° F. When I use my big gas oven, it takes me 50 minutes approx. to bake this.
In the picture below, you can get an idea of the size.
When the first hour had passed, I took the chicken out of the oven and turned the pieces over and arranged the potatoes and onions a little so that everything would cook and brown more evenly.
At this point, I also added the lemon zest.
The chicken turned out beautifully golden brown.
This is the kind of food you can keep in the fridge for a week and reheat each time to have it as freshly made. Although varying the marinade recipe, this is what I usually leave in the fridge for my husband when I go out of town to work at my second job.
As always, I hope you have found this post useful 😁❤️
Bon appetite!
All text and images are my own. I have taken the pictures with my Redmi 9T cell phone. And if any GIFs here, I've used GIPHY for all them.
Thank you so much for your visit :)
