Pepper-Roasted Garlic & Lemon Chicken

Yup that cavity you see at the bottom of the picture is the chicken’s umm… bottom. My apologies if this offends your sensibilities =) By the time I got this dish done I really didn’t have the wherewithal to style any pictures, see. This was the last entree I served up at the same dinner where I made the ice cream slice and apple & blueberry crumble for dessert, as well as pumpkin risotto (yes I am completely obsessed with this dish) and shabu shabu beef and pork veggie rolls.

So yes I have discovered the hard way, that wielding a DSLR after 4 hours of cooking with a stained apron around the waist and over a dozen hungry onlookers does NOT make for pretty and polite pictures! Still, this recipe of Ellie’s is much too good not to share, so you will have to believe me that the deliciousness of this chicken dish far surpasses the quality of my photos.

I love that you don’t need any sauces whatsoever  - the recipe calls only for some salt, pepper, a lemon and some garlic. With these simple ingredients and a little water poured into the baking dish, the chicken comes out of the oven delightfully fragrant, tender and very moist. Genius, really.

I’d like to tell you I have some of my own spin on this recipe, but it’s so simple and excellent I really don’t have anything to add to it, so I’m not going to bother printing it here. You can pick it up at Ellie’s blog. This is going to be one of my party staples fo’ sho’. (This and the vegetable rolls, which I discovered are even better with pork than with beef…)

(On a side note, cooking whole chickens is generally awesome because you can always make use of leftovers. We had some delicious chicken porridge two days later, made using a marvellous chicken stock obtained from boiling the leftover chicken carcass and meat.)