This week
Chicken thighs with potatoes, lemon and far too much oregano
One tray, forty-five minutes, and the potatoes cook in the chicken fat. The only skill required is leaving it alone for long enough.
This week
One tray, forty-five minutes, and the potatoes cook in the chicken fat. The only skill required is leaving it alone for long enough.
Prep
10 min
Oven
45 min
Serves
4
Difficulty
Easy
For 4 people
Swaps
Drumsticks work, breasts do not: they dry out before the potatoes are done. No oregano? Use thyme and halve the amount.
Heat the oven to 220°C fan. Cut the potatoes into pieces about the size of a walnut and the onions into eighths through the root, so they hold together.
Put everything except one lemon into your largest roasting tin. Add the oil, the oregano, a generous amount of salt, and toss with your hands until the potatoes are coated.
Spread it out so nothing overlaps. This is the whole recipe: a crowded tin steams, a spacious one roasts. Use two tins if you need to.
Roast for 30 minutes without touching it. Then slice the remaining lemon, lay it over the top and roast for another 15, until the skin is properly dark.
Rest for five minutes, then squeeze the roasted garlic out of its skins and stir it through the juices in the bottom of the tin. Serve from the tin.
Pale skin after 45 minutes
The tin was too crowded, or the oven is not as hot as it says. Give it ten more minutes near the top.
Potatoes still hard
They were cut too big. Next time, walnut-sized. For now, cover with foil and give them fifteen minutes more.
I cooked a version of this every Tuesday for about two years, and it took me most of that time to work out that the thing I kept getting wrong was the size of the tin. Everything else is forgiving. That is the only reason it is here.
It also reheats better than almost anything else on this site, which matters more on a Wednesday than it does on a Sunday.