Friday, March 6, 2009

40 Cloves and a Chicken

My friend, Michael, talked me into buying a whole chicken a few weeks ago while we were out grocery shopping, assuring me that I could find something to cook with it. BJ and I were in charge of a dinner group this week. Somehow, the two came together. I mentioned it to our friends, Tyler and Meagan, who informed us of the greatest recipe in the world for a whole chicken. So, being brave, I made it. Here I present the recipe!

First, cut up the chicken into 8 pieces. If you're like me and have no idea how to do that, see the steps on this site.

Here's my before cutting up chicken picture (I was really nervous to do this!)

Recipe:

And my after cutting up chicken picture:

Trust me. Cutting up the chicken is the hardest part of the whole recipe. But, in a way, it was kind of fun. Mostly because now, if I were starving and ran across a chicken and could figure out how to kill and pluck it, I would know how to cut it up to cook it. That means I'm cool.

Now, next step... the rest of the recipe!

Ingredients

  • Cut up whole chicken (in 8 pieces. I didn't include the two back portions of the chicken. I didn't wanna deal with pulling chicken off the ribs later.)
  • 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 10 sprigs fresh thyme (Apparently 6 small springs equals approx. 1 tsp dried. So I used just less than 2 tsp. dried thyme and it worked out just fine.)
  • 40 peeled cloves garlic
  • Salt and pepper

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Season chicken with salt and pepper. Toss with a 2 tablespoons olive oil and brown on both sides in a wide frying pan or skillet over high heat. (Make sure said frying pan or skillet is also oven-proof!) Remove from heat, add oil, thyme, and garlic cloves. Cover and bake for 1.5 hours.

Remove chicken from the oven, let rest for 5 to 10 minutes, carve, and serve.



Before cooking:


After cooking:


After it's cooked, the garlic is really, really soft. Almost like unto butter. So we cut up some french bread and spread garlic over it and made garlic bread. It didn't taste quite like your normal garlic bread, but it was still quite tasty.

**Addendum: For the garlic bread, slice the bread, dip in the leftover oil from the chicken (which is infused with garlic), the broil until toasted. Place bread, garlic cloves, and salt on the table. Let each person spread their own garlic on the bread and add salt. We tried this the second time and it definitely tastes better.

Recipe courtesy of Food Network.

2 comments:

Bingham Co said...

That is a lot of garlic. Was it good?

Tianna said...

It was really good. It wasn't as strong as you'd expect, because you don't cut the garlic (which is what gives garlic the strong flavor). It was very flavorful, but it was pretty mild, and I loved it. Plus, the garlic served a double purpose with the french bread. Though, I learned that you should brush the bread with oil, then put the garlic on, then put a bowl of salt on the table and let everyone put a pinch on their own bread. Oh well, live and learn, right?