From the Recipe Box: 50 Clove Garlic Chicken

My love of garlic is no secret. Next to bacon, it is probably one of my favorite food groups. I mean, come on, why do you think I married an Italian?!

One of the previous recipes I’ve shared, my Roasted Garlic and Mushroom Risotto, uses an entire head of roasted garlic. Not to be outdone, today’s recipe uses FIVE. Yep. Five. Holy yum.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• One roaster chicken
• 5 heads of garlic
• 1/4 cup FRESH lemon juice (keep your spent lemons)
• 3/4 – 1 cup olive oil
• salt and pepper
• Herbs de Provence
• 1 – 2 cups chicken stock
• veggies of choice (we used fingerling potatoes and carrots)

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

{Puree}
1. Preheat your oven to 400 F.
2.  Slice about 1/4 inch of the top of each head of garlic. Place in a shallow roasting pan and pour oil over garlic until about a quarter inch deep (usually 3/4 to 1 cup). Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and Herbs de Provence. For this part, I used a small disposable loaf pan from the grocery store that seemed to work pretty well. Cover the top in foil and roast in oven for about 45 minutes. Meanwhile, enjoy the amazing smell of roasted garlic that will fill your house!

3. Once the garlic is roasted and COOLED, squeeze the garlic into a food processor (you can use a blender here if you have to). DO NOT throw away your garlic skins!
4. Add the oil from the pan, your 1/4 cup lemon juice and additional salt and pepper to taste. Puree until smooth. Try to resist eating this with a spoon while you move on to the chicken.

{The Chicken}
1. Drop your oven temp to 375 F.
2. Rinse the chicken and pat dry. Fill the cavity between the skin and the breast with your puree. If you don’t know how to do this, there are some great videos on Youtube that can show you how!
3. Place your spent lemons in the cavity. Truss the chicken and slather in the remaining puree. If you don’t know how to truss a chicken, click here. Not only is it an excellent demo, but the guy is hysterical!
4. Arrange your veggies at the bottom of a roasting dish. I used the baby potatoes so I left them whole. But I did cut up the carrots since I used regular carrots instead of the baby ones. Just use your judgement! Best of all, it makes a built in roasting rack.

5. Place your trussed chicken on top of the veggies and pour the stock until it goes about halfway up the veggies. Add in your garlic skins.
6. Roast for 45 minutes, then turn heat up to 425 and roast for another 20-30 minutes or until the breast is 170 F. You can cover it partway through if the chicken is browning too quickly.

Ok, I’ll admit it – we dug into this chicken so quick that I completely forgot to get a photo before we hacked it to pieces. Oops. But this was sooo tasty and you get your whole meal from the one pan! Not to mention the leftover possibilities. I used some leftover breast meat the next day chopped up on a simple salad. SO good. Heck, if you really wanted garlic overload, you could even use the leftovers in the garlic risotto!

Is anyone else getting their garlic on in the kitchen lately?