Remember when the boys and I made fermented lemons?  Many of you wanted to know what were were going to put these sourpusses with. 

Well, Jenny, from The Nourished Kitchen had a plan and I executed it . . . with the Hottie’s help.

Without further ado, let me introduce to you,

Roast Lemon Chicken with Olives

Ingredients

• 1 whole happy chicken (2 1/2 – 3 lbs)
• 2 tbsps unrefined extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tbsp paprika, preferably smoked
• 2 tsps ground cumin
• 1 tsp powdered turmeric
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1 whole onion, quartered
• 4 preserved lemons
• 1 cup green olives
• 1/2 cup lemon juice

Directions

Thaw your chicken out prior to this particular cooking event. I thought that if I allowed approximately 3 full days to defrost my bird in the fridge that this would be sufficient time.  Wrong.  Of course it didn’t help that the particular refrigerator this fowl sat in partly refroze the chicken’s behind hours before I was to attempt to stuff an onion in a particularly private location of my de-feathered friend.

One more thing . . . make sure to pull out all of the “parts.”  Sometimes the butcher thinks you WANT the heart, gizzard, NECK . . . and maybe you do . . . but it makes me squeamish.  I pulled the “Oh, I still have some pregnancy hormones left in me . . . I’m going to puke . . . you do it, Hottie!”

To which he replied,

But seriously,

• Preheat oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Truss the chicken with cooking twine.  Truss?  Yes, that is exactly what I wondered.  Essentially brace your chicken for its impending doom.  By trussing a chicken you are helping your oven do its job – cooking your chicken evenly and helping to insure moist meat.

Little tip:  make sure to lace your chicken up BEFORE you have applied all of the fixings. (Once again . . . I struggle to follow a recipes instructions.)

• Whisk olive oil, paprika, cumin, turmeric and ginger.

• Stuff chicken with quartered onions. 

You may need to apply some force. 

Just sayin’.

• Brush chicken with mixture of olive oil and spices. 

• Add preserved lemons and green olives to the baking dish with 1/2 cup lemon juice.

• Roast the chicken, covered, at 275 degrees Fahrenheit for three hours. 
• Uncover the chicken, increase the temperature to 425 degrees Fahrenheit and continue roasting for an additional twenty to thirty minutes.

For this particular meal, we pretty much consumed all of the meat, but we saved the remaining juices, lemons, and olives and ladled it over brown rice the following day and it was luscious.

Think this looks to hard to make?  Then consider taking Jenny’s online cooking course.  Learn to cook weird like me!  The course is comprised of 12 classes where you will learn how to prepare and cook nourishing recipes that actually taste yummy and kids will eat!
!!  (Mine are a hard sell and they have enjoyed almost all of Jenny’s meals!)  And the best part, you can attend class in your pajamas!

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