By Jessica Gomes – 

Hello everyone. I hope you all have been able to try some of the recipes thus far! This dish for today’s blog is a great Sunday dish that can serve as leftovers for the week. Today’s blog will teach you a great way to marinate your chicken and keep it juicy without have to brine your chicken. I decided to pair this chicken up with sautéed spinach with garlic and shallots, along with a baked sweet potato with cinnamon, butter and brown sugar and some corn on the cob. These are just a few options I decided to go with, but choose whatever quick and easy side you’d like! The other great thing about baking an entire chicken is that you can slice up a few pieces for a sandwich for lunch.

I took a quick snapshot of the ingredients I use. A must have include low sodium soy sauce, Dijon mustard, Lipton Onion Soup mix and your favorite seasonings. After cleaning your chicken out and patting it dry, I take a few stabs (literally) into the chicken to create mini pockets to add my garlic and unsalted butter to make sure it seeps through the chicken. Afterwards I pretty much give my chicken a bath in my favorite seasonings, including salt, pepper, paprika, chicken seasoning, Adobe, red cayenne pepper, thyme and McCormick’s Rotisserie seasoning. I then use the Dijon mustard, soy sauce and some extra virgin olive oil (or butter) to coat. Lastly, sprinkle some Lipton Onion mix over the chicken and add a few mushrooms or any other veggies you like.  Cover your pan in foil and let the chicken marinate for at least 20 minutes in the fridge. I typically then decide to pre-heat my oven to 375 degrees to make sure it is nice and hot after my 20 minute countdown. The longer you let it marinate, the better, preferably overnight.  Make sure that you have some oil at the bottom of your pan.

Once you’re ready to bake, throw your chicken in the oven covered for approximately 1 ½ hours (based on a 6 ½ lb chicken). Once your time is up, reset your oven to 450 degrees and uncover your chicken to begin the browning for about 20-30 minutes. Make sure to spoon the juice over the chicken periodically to keep the skin from becoming too crisp.  Also add more butter because we all know butter makes everything better!

Once your chicken is ready, let it cool a bit before slicing, but make sure you have a nice sharp knife that makes cutting easier. After slicing, don’t forget to spoon a bit more of the juices to make sure your meat is juicy and moist! There is nothing worse than dry chicken! Don’t forget that while your chicken is baking for all that time, to prep your side dishes.

Overall this chicken takes about 15 minutes in prep time and 2 hours in cooking time.  So again, once you get the easiest and messiest part out of the way in prepping, you can easily throw this in the oven during the weekend or even late at night because this serves amazingly the next day! You can simply reheat your chicken in the pan so that the juices resurface!

You do not need to spend hours on your feet trying to make a dish…let your oven take care of those hours for you! If you’re looking for more ideas of weeknight, weekend or party dishes, feel free to visit to my Instagram account SimplyJess120 or hastag #simplydeliciosa. Leave any feedback comments or if you have a main ingredient but you want to know a great way to cook it, please leave a comment.

Now time to enjoy!