recipe review: lemon chicken

so i've been following shutterbean for a while now and have bookmarked/saved a number of her recipes for future use. when i saw her lemon chicken recipe yesterday, i sent it on to quasi-landlord with a note saying that we should probably try it out, given that the most recent trip to costco yielded almost a whole freezer shelf full of chicken breasts and chicken thighs.

i was willing to leave it at that and figured that we'd get around to trying this out at some point. "at some point" turned out to be tonight, thanks to the "hey, did we defrost anything for dinner?" conversation i had with quasi-landlord this morning. luckily, we already had everything else on hand, so i was perfectly ok with taking charge of dinner prep.

of course, me being me, i did a couple of things differently - i used 5 cloves of garlic instead of 3 b/c the cloves were kinda small and also b/c both quasi-landlord and i agree that garlic is delicious. i used 1 medium-large sweet onion b/c sweet onions are delicious and that's what was in the kitchen. i skipped the parsley b/c i was unable to locate it in the fridge and by the time everything was done, i was ready to put food in my face and couldn't be bothered to continue looking for parsley. i regret nothing.

instead of rice, i made some of this rice and lentil medley that we'd picked up from whole paycheck once upon a time. yeah, i know - i'm not usually a big fan of lentils either, but i'm ok with them when they're mixed into other things, like rice, or beans. i called dibs on the leftover roasted broccoli we had in the fridge and quasi-landlord had peas. definitely spoon some of the sauce on the rice, or potatoes, or pasta, or whatever.

verdict? omg lemon. the lemons i used were definitely large and if you like the taste of lemon, you should definitely find the largest lemons you can get your hands on for this recipe b/c omg lemon. i baked the dish for 40 minutes and then let it sit, covered, for another 10 minutes. the chicken was perfectly done, except for the edges that were slightly over-cooked b/c they'd gotten a head-start during the quick defrost i gave them in the microwave. the onions weren't as brown as i thought they'd be, but they were still delicious. quasi-landlord & i agree that we'd be up for making this again, maybe with bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs to see if there's a noticeable difference in the thickness of the sauce.

and there you have the 1st recipe review of 2014. took me long enough, didn't it? :P