Roast Chicken

There are so many recipes for Roast Chicken and even I have gone through several different recipes until I finally settled on just one. My version of roast chicken is lightly marinated with garlic because I find that roasting with just olive oil or butter and salt & pepper is a bit too bland for my liking.

So, here it is, my roast chicken recipe.

Ingredients:
One whole chicken, trim the ends and the extra skin at the cavity.
2 cloves garlic, crushed
3 onions- 2 chopped into big chunks and 1 onion leave it as a whole
3 carrots, chopped into big chunks
Thyme and Rosemary, (preferably fresh, if not dry ones are good enough)
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil
A lil bit of butter
additional: clementines

Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Scatter the chopped onions and carrots onto a roasting pan, a pinch of rosemary and thyme, drizzle some olive oil and season. Set that aside.
Now, smother your chicken with olive oil, salt & pepper and the crushed garlic, making sure that you rub all over. Insert one whole onion and the herbs into the cavity. (you can add 2 clementines, cut into half into the cavity for some xmas taste).
Place the chicken, breast down on the roasting tray, on top of the chopped vege. Finally, sprinkle a bit more salt again with some of the rosemary and thyme herbs, as well as a dash of olive oil.
Usually, I'll add a few knobs of butter onto the chicken and the roasting tray.

Cover the chicken loosely with foil and put it in the oven for 45 mins for 180 deg. Then, remove the foil, making sure that the meat of the chicken is cooked. You'd know it's cooked when the meat is all white. Then put it back in the oven at 150-170 degrees and roast it until the skin turns crispy brown. Once the back side is brown, turn the chicken breast side on top, and roast it until it's golden brown. When doing this, make sure that your oven is about 140-150 degrees. Before that, transfer all the juices at the bottom of pan into a saucepan, taking all the onions and carrots (if you can manage).

The reason that you start off with the breast of the chicken down on the tray is to not over cook it. The breast gets dry easily and if you want to roast your chicken to a perfert golden brown, then be sure that the breast will be really dry. So, to avoid that, start with breast down, with this, all the juices will move down to the bottom of pan and obviously to the breast too. So, what you get is a tender, prefectly cooked meat.

Now, move on to the yummy juices in the saucepan. That will be your gravy. Put the saucepan on a medium heat. Stir it well, add 1-1.5cups of fresh boiling water and a half a cube of stock. Let it simmer and thicken. Add salt and pepper to taste. (if you find that it's hard to thicken the gravy, mix a teaspoon of cornflour with 2 tablespoon of water and add it to the gravy, whilst stirring- that should help)

So, there you go. Of course, serve it with your favourite vege and yokshire pudding!

That's actually the roast turkey I made last year. It's not chicken but I hope the picture helps and I used the same recipe too!

Hope that'll help, Hawa! ;)