Roast Chicken and Tomato Herb Flatbread

Ben and I both read the blog The Simple Dollar, which recently had a post about how it is much more economical to get whole chickens. This, along with noticing how cheap whole chickens can be at the grocery store, inspired Ben to buy one. We planned to make it on Saturday night, and since we knew we couldn't eat it all ourselves, we invited Lori and Jeff over for dinner.

Since my class for my masters program just ended on Friday, I wanted to spend Saturday cleaning and cooking instead of doing homework. Yes - I WANTED to. I can barely believe that I wrote that sentence. Ben's dad came over in the morning to help finish up some framing work in the upstairs (I haven't posted about that project for awhile because we had an unfortunate turn of events with our contractor that I'd rather not go into - but more updates to come soon!) so I went to the grocery store to get provisions for the week. When I got back, they were finished, so Ben and I tackled the project of cleaning most of the house - it had been longer than I'd care to admit since we had done that!

Once that was done, it was time to start cooking. I had seen this recipe for Tomato Herb Flatbread which looked delicious and not that difficult. We just got a baking stone last weekend so it seemed like the perfect way to try it out for the first time. I have NEVER even considered making my own dough/bread/anything involving yeast and rising, so this was a huge step for me.

Ingredients for Dough


Dough before and after rising


Ingredients for Toppings of Flatbread

I do not have a stand mixer (nor do I plan on ever getting one - we have so little counter space as it is, I don't need one more thing cluttering it up!) so I just used my hands to knead the dough. Other than that, I pretty much followed the recipe. I did have a bit of a hard time when it came to actually putting the dough on the baking stone though - I had put it on foil, and it was just sticking so badly that I decided I would just remake the dough and flatten it out again and assemble the whole thing on the stone instead of trying to mess with transfering it with all the toppings on it. That worked really well for me - because of this, the dough was kind of uneven and probably a little thicker than it is supposed to be, but it still turned out great! I was so flustered by all this that I ALMOST forgot to put the cheese on top - but I remembered a second later, and just took it back out, sprinkled cheese, and put it back in the oven. It took about 15 minutes to cook through for mine, but could have been because of the frequent opening and closing of the oven.

I had seen a number of recipes for Roast Chicken that I'd like to try eventually (including Beer Can Chicken) but for our first time, we just wanted a very simple recipe, so we went with the one in our How to Cook Everything book, with a few changes.

Roast Chicken with New Potatoes, Onions, and Garlic
1 whole (3-4 lb) chicken, trimmed of excess fat, then rinsed and patted dry with paper towels
8 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons fresh sage
a few shakes dried thyme and marjoram
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 1/2- 2 lbs red potatoes, quartered
1 onion, chopped into large chunks
1 whole head of garlic, separated into individual unpeeled cloves

Preheat Oven to 500
Place chicken, breast side down in a roasting pan and put in the oven
Mix together olive oil and seasonings
Add half the mixture to the potatoes and stir to coat
After chicken has roasted for 10 minutes, remove from oven, spoon olive oil mixture over chicken, then turn over and spoon the rest of the mixture. Add potatoes, onions, and garlic to the roasting pan.
After 15 minutes, turn temp down to 325 and cook for about 35 more minutes, until an thermometer in the chicken thigh reads 160 degrees.

We were going to also add carrots to this mixture, but the pan was already packed full. We had steamed green beans tossed with a little olive oil, minced garlic, and chopped basil (inspired by this recipe) which were delicious but I didn't get a photo of them.

This was a wonderful meal! The night was already close to perfect, but was made even better by us going to Maxwell's later that night - finally our favorite bar has re-opened!

The one sad part was that this faced us the next morning, and we don't have a dishwasher.... this doesn't even include all the pots and pans...