D's Lemon Chicken

I prefaced this recipe with D specifically because I have a lemon chicken recipe, and LB has a lemon chicken recipe (which I think should be called cinnamon chicken because he goes so crazy with the spices, but he says he'll tone it down). What recipes I know are mostly due to my Chilean grandmother teaching them to me, and this is no exception! While I love going back to Maryland and enjoying exceptional food that I'll never get anywhere else, I do like to have a substitute so I don't have to wait 6 months to a year to go, "Yummmm."

So I finally asked her how to make various faves, and found myself having to, "Wait, how much butter? How much salt? How much is too much?" Well since this is pretty much all to eye and you know how much to put in with practice, this makes transcribing this to a "recipe" pretty hard, especially since I've gotten comfortable with eyeballing stuff like that too. BUT! I'll do my best to explain as easily as possible, which shouldn't be to hard because this is seriously super-duper easy to make, and the first recipe I got down pretty well.

Ingredients:
- ~1 lb Chicken (I like to use drumsticks or thighs because they're mega cheap, and that also tends to be what my grandma cooks too)
- Garlic (1/2 clove per chicken piece)
- Lemon juice (if using a real lemon, half-a-lemon's worth of juice; if using bottled juice, about 2 tbsp)
- Salt
- Pepper
- 1-2 tbsp Butter

First, let's start with the prep, hmm? First thing, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. This seems to be the magical number of cooking since most of the stuff I cook, meat-wise, gets cooked at that temperature. While it's pre-heating, arrange the chicken in a baking dish.

Get out your garlic, and (and this is a recent secret I've discovered) crush the cloves with a large knife. Cut a slit into the chicken pieces, and put about half a clove (the average size of a clove, there are some baby cloves and some fatty cloves where you have to make a judgement call) into each chicken piece. Take your lemon juice, either half a lemon or 2 tablespoons, whatever's enough to moisten all of it, and y'know, put it on the chicken. I like to do this before seasoning so seasoning will stick on it, as opposed to lemon juice washing it off afterward. Anyway, then I salt and pepper to what looks good, if I had to put measurements on it, I'd say 1/2 tbsp of salt, 2 tsp of pepper? Is 2 teaspoons the same as 1/2 a tablespoon? If so, I apologize! Then get your 1-2 tbsp of butter, really it just depends on how juicy you want your chicken, and cut it up into like, 4 pieces and get it spread out over the chicken so that it'll look like this!

Now, there's two paths you can follow after this. You can cover up the chicken with some aluminum foil, allowing you to have a way juicer chicken, and you can pour that ish all over pasta or mashed potatoes or rice or what have you. But! You can leave the aluminum foil off! This will leave you with much less juice, but a crispier chicken which is delectable! You could also try out a half-and-half, start out with aluminum foil, and take it off halfway in. Either way, I keep the chicken in there for about 45 minutes. Really this picture to the right is to show Megan that I use her apron quite often!

Anyway, tonight's chicken turned out nice and crispy, and I paired it with "Pappardelle" egg pasta from Trader Joe's. I've recently rediscovered my love of egg noodles/pasta, I think it has a really great texture when mixed with chicken juice and juices of that nature. What I am notorious for pairing lemon chicken with, however, is onion-sautee'd rice, which will eventually pop up in this blog; it's the main way I like to cook rice.

We've gotten pretty serious about this blog, LB has even mocked up some actual designs that we'd like, besides these dumb generic templates, so hopefully he comes through with it! He was supposed to do his version of lemon chicken yesterday, but Mama LB has come into town and it's thrown a wrench in our scheduling. But there is a schedule! Tomorrow will most likely be pork chops, which is my recipe, but LB is well-versed in how to make it because it's his favorite dish that I make! We also forgot that Thursday is Valentine's Day, where we'll be dining out (Black Angus, holla!) so that'll also be a marked off day. Sometime soon you can anticipate Mexican night, though, mark your generalized calendars! Closing, as usual, is LB cleaning up! I don't just always make LB clean up, I've just been the one cooking, and we switch things off like that. You get your first D clean up pic tomorrow!