Jamie's roast chicken

Earlier this week I felt like eating roast chicken. We had lamb out so I made do with a lamb stew and saved up the chicken roast until Sunday evening!

I did a quick search of my cookbooks and failed to find a roast chicken recipe, so I turned to the internet and Jamie Oliver for some inspiration. I used his recipe for Roast chicken with lemon and rosemary.

1.2kg free range chicken
900g potatoes
1 large lemon
1 bulb garlic, broken into cloves
handful lemon thyme
olive oil
handful rosemary sprigs, leaves picked
1 carrot


Boil a large pot of water. Preheat oven to 190C.

Cut the potato into golfball sized pieces and cook with the whole lemon and garlic cloves for 12 minutes.

Drain and allow to steam dry for one minute, then remove the lemon and garlic. Return the potato to the pan and toss. According to JO this will help to crisp up the potatoes when they are roasted.

Stab the lemon ten times. Pat the chicken down with kitchen paper and rub it with olive oil. Put the garlic cloves, lemon and thyme into the cavity. Place the chicken on a rack in a roasting tray and bake for 35 minutes.

Remove chicken and rack from the tray. Add the potato, carrot and rosemary leaves and coat with the fat in the tray. Replace the chicken and rack into the tray and bake for a further 35 minutes.

Notes
- JO = Jamie Oliver
- lemon, thyme and garlic all fresh from the garden!
- I skipped the part where JO salts the chicken
- As soon as I placed the lemon in the water I could smell it
- Far too many potatoes! This meal would feed four. JO suggests 2kg of potatoes for the recipe and I used less than half and still think it was too many.