Medium
4 to 6
Published 2000
Cooking chicken with fruit is part of a long established Hispano-Arabic tradition. In this Turkish recipe from Sefarad Yemekleri, green apples and pomegranate combine to make a festive winter dish for the Sabbath or the holidays. A similar recipe also appears in Le feste ebraiche, published by the Jewish community of Rome. Upon reading this recipe, my concern was that the chicken would fall apart if roasted for 1½ hours and then roasted again for another 30 minutes to cook the potatoes. So I decided to roast the chicken in the first phase for only 1 to a ¼ hours, and to parboil the potatoes so that the second cooking phase would be shorter as well. After making the recipe the first time, I discovered that the onions in the stuffing had a slightly unpleasant raw taste that remained even after all that time in the oven. To solve the problem, I now sauté the onions briefly before adding them to the apples.
Rinse the chicken and rub the outside and the cavity with the oil, salt, pepper, and the cut sides of the halved lemon. Squeeze the juice from the lemon halves and reserve. You should have about
Warm
Place the chicken in the oven and
Scoop the stuffing into a bowl. Cut the chicken into serving pieces and place it in the baking pan. Spoon the stuffing into the center of the chicken pieces, and surround with the potatoes. Sprinkle the potatoes with salt and pepper. Return the pan to the oven and roast until the potatoes are tender and the chicken is cooked through, about 15 minutes, turning the potatoes over once after they begin to take on color.
Remove the pan from the oven and transfer the chicken, stuffing, and potatoes to a platter. Serve at once.
© 2000 Joyce Goldstein. All rights reserved.