Roast Chicken with Tarragon and Lemon - Recipe

So I had never cooked an entire chicken before, but Prawn and I are huge fans of whole deli chickens that I thought I'd might as well start with this recipe from the Attack Phase.

Whole chickens were on sale 2 for 10$ so I picked up two. Decided to cook them together and they turned out great!

This recipe is found on pg 195 of the Dukan Diet.

INGREDIENTS

A 2 1/2 to 3 lbs whole chicken
1 fresh lemon, cut in half
1 clove garlic, diced
Salt and pepper
2 tsp dried tarragon
1 medium onion, chopped

Preheat the oven to 350, the book says to preheat it to 425, you can do that if you choose but the cooking time will be less.

Clean, rinse, and pat the chicken dry with paper towels... this part, for someone who has never dealt with a raw, whole chicken, was pretty scary. In fact Prawn had to do the first chicken since I was so scared. I did end up cleaning the chicken but I'm telling you. Feels weird.

Squeeze one half of the lemon over the outside of the chicken then rub the chicken with garlic, salt and pepper.


Place the tarragon, onion, and other half of the lemon inside the chicken. I used a red onion because that was all that was left in the house. When cooked (I'm assuming because of the lemon) the red onion turns blue... totally turned me off. I did not eat the onion at all. Prawn says the lemon made the onion taste way too sweet. I don't see what the lemon added to the chicken... so maybe just avoid using it altogether.

Our seasoned chickens filled with tarragon, lemon and red onion.

Also tarragon is a very strong spice. I think I would have preffered rosemary. It is best to put the spice inside the chicken before the onion and lemon... kindof hard to spice the chicken when it's already stuffed, as I have now learned.

I then drowned the outside of my chicken in seasoning. When we get the deli chickens they always have seasoning on the skin, we thought we would mimic that. We used Ms. Dash chicken spice.

We wrapped both our birds in individual foil wraps.

Place the chicken on an ovenproof pan and cover it with foil.

Bake the chicken in the oven until a thermometer inserted into the middle of the chicken registers at 170 degrees. This took us about 2 hours.

Take the foil off and let the top brown for 10 minutes.

Yummy, delicious!

So this recipe actually turned out good! I will definitely stop being so scared of whole chickens and cook them more often for Prawn and I. I will also try experimenting with different spices and stuffing combinations. I don't know what took me so long to cook this!

xoxo