Just Chicken: A Simple, Gourmet Supper

I love to try new and exciting recipes. I love to read cookbooks and recipe blogs. I love to cook gourmet food. But after a few weeks of being on a new food roll, I get worn out. Worn out = me not cooking, which = eating out. Eating out then = me feeling crappy because I ate a bunch of who-knows-what and feeling guilty because I should have planned better and not spent the extra moolah on expensive food that made me feel awful. 

Sometimes the simplest meals are the ones I cook the least. 

Tonight, I made a super simple supper: garlic-herb roasted chicken, roasted carrots, salad, and flax bread and butter. Then we had vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream frosting for dessert!

Doesn't sound very simple, does it? Well, it was! Here's how I made the simplest supper we've had in a while. {Snapping photos, chopping carrots, and all, this literally took me 15 minutes from start to oven!}

Garlic-Herb Roasted Chicken

1 organic chicken, washed

1/3 cup coconut oil

3 ginormous cloves of garlic, peeled

1 TBSP coarse sea salt

2 tsp. herbes de Provence

1 tsp. peppercorns

3-4 sprigs fresh thyme

Put the chicken in a glass baking dish. Combine everything but the chicken in a food processor and process until garlic is down to small chunks. You can remove the thyme leaves from the stem before processing, but my processor did a great job of getting the leaves off the stem. Then I fished the stems out by hand. 

Rub this mixture all over your chicken and roast at 350 degrees for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Roasted Carrots

4-5 large carrots, peeled and chopped

a pinch of ground pepper

two pinches of fine sea salt

a sprinkling of nutmeg

a sprinkling of ginger

coconut oil

Place chopped carrots in a baking dish. Add seasonings. Dot the top with coconut oil. Place in the same 350-degree oven and roast for 40-50 minutes, depending on how tender you like your carrots. Once you see the coconut oil melt, you can stir the carrots around to evenly coat.

I made the bread and the cake yesterday. But I did warm the bread in the oven during the last few minutes of roasting the chicken and carrots. 

Salad for us is anything but fancy: organic red leaf lettuce, torn into pieces, and topped with grated Parmesan and Caesar dressing. That's it.

I need to make more meals like this. And...I'm not one to toot my own horn, but this was DANG good!


What simple meals end up being your favorite? Care to share your recipes?

This post was shared at Food Renegade's Fight Back Friday.