Lemon Roasted Chicken

Chicken has made many appear­ances in our home in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent dishes. For Sun­day din­ner we decided to do some­thing that is sim­ple and suc­cu­lent with the fra­grant aroma of lemon waft­ing through the air. I love lemon by the way. More than most peo­ple. Lately it’s been my go to item. Lemon in baked goods, many a meal and even my var­i­ous bev­er­ages. Lemon roasted chicken is a dish that is sim­ple to make, fills the house with its beau­ti­fully meld­ing fla­vors while it cooks, and is a fam­ily pleaser. If it can make my fam­ily clean their plates it can make anyone’s. Pair it with whipped sweet pota­toes and a side salad and you’re in food heaven.

When you make it you will want to use bone-in chicken breasts. With the bone-in you receive a bet­ter fla­vor and moist­ness, can get a crispy skin for those that eat the skin, and you can save some money as bone-in is usu­ally less money out of your pocket than deboned ver­sion.   Also, often they are huge mak­ing it easy to have left­overs & if you make extra (more than what you need to feed the fam­ily) the next day you can make roasted chicken salad sand­wiches or add the chicken to a hearty salad with feta, toma­toes and olives by pulling the chicken off the bone. That’s good eatin’!

What You Need:

4 Bone-in Chicken Breasts

Olive Oil

Salt

Pep­per

One Lemon

Exact mea­sure­ments vary depend­ing on size of chicken.

How to Put It Together:

Place your oven rack to the mid­dle of the oven. Pre­heat oven to 450 degrees.

Pat chicken dry.  Place in a large bak­ing dish, 9x13 should work.

Then rub olive oil on your chicken.  Salt & Pep­per gen­er­ously. You want to help bring out and enhance the fla­vors of your chicken.  Cut up one lemon into fours.

Cook for 30–45 min­utes, check­ing to see if they are done around the 30–35 minute mark.  Remem­ber to account for the size of the breast, the big­ger it is the longer it takes to cook & the smaller the less time you need.

I don’t flip my breasts & place them breast side up. Why? Because I’m lazy. Really it’s the only reason.

How­ever, some do the flip method.If you decide to flip start them breast side down, then at that the 15 minute mark flip them breast side up.

To check to see if they are done you want to place a ther­mome­ter into the thick­est part of the meat, avoid the bone. You want the chicken breast meat to be 165 degrees inter­nal tem­per­a­ture and for the chicken’s juices to run clear.

When you take it out, cover it with an alu­minum tent & let sit for 10–15 min­utes before cut­ting or serving.

Then plate the chicken, squeeze the roasted lemon over top, and pair with a great side.  Per­fect for Sun­day or any day of the week.  Once you go sim­ple roast bone-in chicken you’ll never go back.  From here you can play with sea­son­ings as well and oh the cre­ations you can make.

Tagged as: chicken, cooking, dinner, easy recipe, food, food & drink, frugal, homecooking, simple recipe