Sunday dinner recipe: garlicky chicken

Just tried a new and simple chicken recipe from In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite a cookbook written by Melissa Clark. You might recall, the first recipe I tried from her cookbook was a sweet treat that was quite tasty. My second undertaking from the book is a recipe called “Not-my-Grandma’s Chicken with Lemon, Garlic, and Oregano” and is basically baked drumsticks (which my family loves) basted with a scrumptious tangy garlic lemon and oregano paste.
Dish was a big success and couldn’t be easier, great served over rice or with buttered noodles, greens on the side (we had peas with mint butter, not-so-fancy since I picked it up from the frozen aisle at Trader Joe’s!).

The key is to broil the drumsticks first a bit before slathering on the lemon-garlic paste, otherwise the garlic will burn and become blackened and bitter. Here’s what it looks like when you get started (I doubled the recipe, as it was written to serve two and we have four hungry mouths in this house):

The best part of this dish is first, the nice moist meat and second, the pan juices that come about after the roasting of the chicken, light and yummy, and very fragrant… when I was cooking it my husband kept hunting around the kitchen asking when it was time to eat. 🙂

Sorry I don’t have a picture of the finished product, sadly, my mobile phone camera didn’t do it justice, and I had my hands full so didn’t bother to get DSLR out. Suffice to say, the outside was crispy brown and when I served it over the jasmine rice with the pan juices and browned mixture scooped over, it was a hit. My littlest ate two drumsticks, the five-year-old three, and my husband FIVE. The kicker is that the whole thing took less than an hour and required mainly ingredients you already have around. As a good friend of mine is known to say “winner, winner, chicken dinner” – indeed.