This chicken sums up what I am trying to do with this blog: it looks preventatively impressive, but it’s impossibly easy. It is a real wow at a dinner party, but has also become a weekly staple in our meal prep (read at the bottom of the recipe)

Slow Roasted Spiced Chicken

1 5-6 lb whole chicken, cleaned, rinsed and dried

2 lemons, quartered

6 garlic cloves, smashed

2 TB smoked paprika

2 TB chili powder

2 TB light brown sugar

2 TB cumin

2 TB kosher salt

1 TB fresh ground black pepper

1 TB lemon pepper

¼ + 1 TB cup extra virgin olive oil

Kitchen twine

Preheat oven to 300. Make sure the giblets have been removed and you have rinsed your chicken and patted it dry. Stuff the chicken with the lemon quarters and garlic. In a small bowl mix all of the spices together.

Carefully run your fingers under the skin on each breast of the chicken, between the skin and the meat, gently pulling it slightly loose from the breast. This is not as gross or hard as it sounds. You’re making a little flavor trap. Put your extra 1 TB of olive oil in there and rub it around. Then spoon a little bit of the spice mixture into the space you have created and spread to make sure the top of both breasts are coated. This makes sure the breast is nicely flavored and not dry.

Rub the rest of the olive oil over all parts of the chicken and spoon the spice mixture liberally across the whole bird. Tie up the legs (doens’t matter how) to hold the lemon and garlic in, and place the chicken breast side up in a roasting pan. Make it a nice roasting pan because when this chicken is cooked it is so tender that it is hard to transfer to a serving platter (as you can see from the photo where the right wing fell right apart!)

Roast the chicken for three hours, basting it three times. I baste at 1hr, 2hr and 2:30. The first time you baste there won’t really be much to baste with, but second and third the juices will be juiciferous. Don’t be worried if parts of the crust turn very dark - those are the best bits. Allow chicken to rest 10 mins before serving.

Last thing: We make this on Sundays. We buy ingreds for this chicken and butter dal, a veg for that night, and two pre made salad bags at Trader Joes. We eat the thighs for dinner Sunday with the veg. We shred the breasts and mix them into to the salads for lunch (we get two servings out of each bag of salad so that is lunch for both of us for two days, say Mon and Tues). I make the dal with the bones and leftovers from the chicken. Then we eat drums, wings and dal for dinner later in the week. This is to say this chicken yields us 8 meals and is a great thing to add to your weekly meal preperoni menus.

Slow Roasted Spiced Chicken

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