Spatchcocked Chicken

I’ve had a whole organic chicken in the freezer for a while and I finally decided to use it up for Sunday dinner. I came up a hybrid Martha/Lucinda Scala Quinn method for cooking it. I have Lucinda’s book, MadHungry (which is great) and have seen both her and Martha spatchcock (I know it sounds obscene!) a chicken on the Martha show (spatchcocking means you cut out the backbone and flatten the chicken to cook it – it cooks much faster this way). I combined this method with the idea in November Everyday Food to cook carrots and potatoes in the pan with chicken parts and with Lucinda’s pan sauce for her spatchcocked chicken in her book.

So, first I cut out the backbone and flattened the chicken. I put it insides down in a roasting pan and surrounded it with carrots and baby red potatoes. I seasoned the chicken with rosemary, salt and pepper and some roast chicken seasoning I got from my mom. I put the salt and pepper and rosemary on the veggies, as well as some olive oil and roasted it all in a 400 degree oven for about 45  minutes (until the chicken was 165). I removed the chicken and carrots and stuck the roasting pan on a burner with the potatoes still in it – I wanted them a little crispier. When they were done, I removed them and added a few tablespoons of olive oil, 2 chopped cloves of garlic and 2 tbsp lemon juice to the pan. I cooked it long enough to soften the garlic then served it.

This was AMAZING. First of all, it’s so much faster than a regular roast chicken and feels less fussy. The pan sauce was fabulous and so incredibly simple -something about the lemon and garlic is just to die for. We ate the sauce on both the chicken and on the potatoes. It was perfect. I highly recommend this dinner!!!