Easiest. Dinner. Ever

Gosh, hasn’t it been a while? My apologies for the lack of recipes lately. August was crazily busy and (mostly) very good fun. Lots of good eating – but none of the cooking was done by me. Fabulous wedding in Ireland with a seven course meal (I think, I lost count), a beautiful tapas meal cooked for my birthday, and a late birthday lasagne and enormous cake. All lovely.

But now it’s time for me to start contributing again. This is a bit of a cheat. Anyone can do this recipe, or variations of it, but the fact is it’s really really nice. And if you don’t already have a version of this in your repertoire, you should, because it tastes much better than you’d expect from just a bit of chopping.

So here’s my recipe for roasted chicken legs with Mediterranean vegetables, and a lemon and pine nut cous cous.

To tart up this dinner I made foccacia earlier today, according to this recipe:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/rosemary_and_sea_salt_12392

But added my own toppings. I made a couple, one with olives and rosemary, another with chopped garlic and basil and some lemon juice. It was all good fun! But I’m not one for typing out someone else’s recipes so click on the link above.

Stick your oven on to preheat at around 190 degrees.

For this you will need a bucketload of Mediterranean type veg. I had a courgette, an aubergine, a pepper, a couple of small onions, a handful of cherry tomatoes and a few cloves of garlic. Chop everything up into big chunks and put it in a roasting tin. Chop the garlic roughly and scatter it over the top, then if you’ve got any basil tuck half a dozen basil leaves in amongst it too. (Rosemary works well with this; the first time I had a variation of this meal at a friend’s house it was made with rosemary and the smells were brilliant).

Now slosh over a good load of olive oil (erm, maybe 6 tablespoons? I have no idea) and about half as much balsamic vinegar.

Now put a couple of chicken legs on the top of it and season liberally – the salt will help the chicken skin to go crispy, but the meat will stay moist because of all the steam from the vegetables. I’m a big fan of chicken legs (or any meat on the bone really) as it is so much tastier than chicken breasts, which go dry very easily.

Shove in the oven for about forty minutes. I lifted the chicken and gave the vegetables a good stir around half way through.

It also helps to baste the chicken with some of the lovely juices from the bottom of the pan – but you only need to do this once. 

You don’t have to have this with cous cous – it’s nice with roasted new potatoes or just steamed new potatoes. But this time we were having easy dinner.

Toast some pine nuts in a dry frying pan (keep an eye on them, they burn easily) and chop some parsley. You’ll be able to tell if the chicken is nearly ready because the juices will run clear when you poke it with a skewer or sharp knife. At this point, cook some cous cous according to the instructions on the packet, then stir through the pine nuts, parsley, the juice of half a lemon, another slosh of olive oil and some salt and pepper. 

A bonus from this recipe is that you will have chuffing LOADS of roasted veg leftover. This makes a lovely pasta sauce for another day. Just cook some pasta, warm the roasted veg, add a dollop of crème fraiche and stir the whole lot together. Again, you wouldn't expect it to be so good, but it’s awesome.