Garlic Chicken

You have to try this garlic chicken.

Here's the background: my dad likes to make "chicken with 40 cloves of garlic", a recipe he got from the Times. His uses a whole chicken with tons of garlic cloves (still unpeeled), olive oil and the "Scarborough Fair" mix (parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme). He'll bake the chicken in a clay pot.

I decided to repeat this recipe, with a few modifications. First of all, since this chicken is baked long and slow, I decided to go with dark meat only (in my case, just thighs). See, I used to like white meat cooked long and slow until it was so soft that it fell off the bone. Recently, though, my tastes have changed. I now think, as do many others, that white meat cooked for too long is dry. So if I'm going to cook it, I'll only cook it until it's just done and still juicy. In theory, I could still cook a whole chicken in pieces using a long-and-slow recipe, but take out the breasts before taking out the dark meat. But a) this is annoying and b) breasts, even when the bone is still in, are at least twice as expensive as dark meat, so I generally avoid them.

Second of all, I saw that most of the garlic chicken recipes online were calling for peeled garlic. I was concerned, because what I like about my dad's unpeeled garlic version is that the garlic, when roasted for a long time, pops out of the peel as a creamy, garlicky spread. I wasn't sure if unpeeled cloves would roast the same way, or if they would dry out. But I decided to peel them and see what happened.

Third of all, I added chopped onions and chopped white potatoes to the bottom of the pan. We had them lying around, and we often add onions and potatoes to chicken. It always comes out well and I had no doubt that it would work.

Lastly, I didn't have parsley, sage, or rosemary; only thyme was on my side. I picked up an 80 cent parsley baggie at shoprite (yes, I know I live in Elizabeth, but I can assure you it WAS parsley), but didn't feel like shelling out another $5 for sage and rosemary. I don't use them very often. Instead, I used dried basil and dried dill, which I had anyway. In this case, I figured the particular herbs didn't matter. I was using dry, rather than fresh, and I was just trying to give the dish a general "herby" flavor. As long as I had some kind of herb in there, I knew it would do the trick. (This rule would not work if your dish had a distinct herb flavor. For example, if you are making fresh basil pesto, you can't use anything else. And if you want a distinctly dill flavor in a soup or tzatziki, you need dill. You get the idea).

So here's the final recipe: chopped onion and white potatoes in a Pyrex; add like 2 whole heads of peeled garlic cloves (plus the root part was snipped off) which have been lightly fried in about 1/4 cup of olive oil (pour the oil in too); rub chicken thighs with a little olive oil; sprinkle on your dry herbs; place them on top of the veggies; splash some white wine over each thigh and let it run down to the bottom. Bake at 350 for about 2 hours, or until you like it.

We've made some good chicken in our day, but this was really good. The chicken was moist and fall off the bone, the skin beautifully crisp and flavorful. The potatoes and onions had a ton of flavor, and were addictive. The garlic cloves were just as creamy as I'd hoped, perfect for spreading on bread. Major winner.

The rest of our Shabbat recipes were repeats from before - crispy broccoli, stir fried zucchini, and deli sandwiches for lunch.