dinner

Tonight's dinner was roasted chicken with onions (both red & yellow) and fresh thyme. Oh, and some wilted spinach. Remember I got some fresh herbs? which I wrote about (here) .

Well, the watercress that I also got was dead this morning, all shrively dead. So I cut off the dead stems and leaves and gave it some water and what do you know? It revived, in the same day! Wow!

So, anyway, after seeing the "dead" watercress, I figured, I better do something with the other herbs that I got. I looked in "The Naked Chef" cookbook by Jamie Oliver.

I've always enjoyed his shows when they were on the Food Network. His accent was really cool and even though half of the time, I didn't really understand what he was saying, his style of cooking looked fun!

The best part about this cookbook is that he indexes everything by the ingredient, I just looked under "thyme" and there were all kinds of recipes listed!

Anyway, on page153 of the cookbook there is a recipe for "Roasted Red Onion with Thyme and Butter".

I followed the recipe--somewhat and ad-libbed a bit too.

Here's the original recipe:

Roasted Red Onion with Thyme and Butter
Serves 6

Try to get 6 equal-sized medium to large red onions. Remove the first layer of skin.

With a knife, just take the bottom of the core end of the onion off, to give it a flat base, and make 2 cuts in a cross-shape in the top, cutting half-way down (do not cut right through into quarters).

Push some chopped or pounded fresh thyme into these gaps with a good pinch of salt (it's important to get the salt right into the gaps) and a little piece of butter.

I prefer to cook the onions in an earthenware dish on a thin layer of sea salt or I put them in with my roast chicken or lamb and they cook quite happily in the same tray.

Place in the oven at 400F for 30-35 minutes. These onions are great with a roast, so tasty and sweet.

Note: Since I was only cooking for 2, I got 2 onions, one red and one yellow and halved both. With half a red and half a yellow, I cut these into half again.

I then lined two pyrex dishes with foil and put one fourth of each onion in. Then I cut 170g of chicken into 4 pieces and put two pieces in each dish and put some minced garlic on top, then I dotted each piece in the dish with butter, sprinkled some sea salt , ground some fresh pepper and then laid the fresh thyme on top.

I cooked it for 30 minutes in a 200C oven (actually I used the "cooking with foil button" on my oven and it is like putting it into a toaster oven for the 30 minutes). The onions were so soft and very tasty and the chicken was cooked just right. Try it, it is an easy dish to make especially when you working moms who come home from work and don't really feel like standing in front of the stove!

Enjoy!