Lemon-butt chicken and an onion-cheese tart.

Who wants recipes? I made some tasty stuff this weekend.

Lemon-butt chicken: Jamie Oliver calls this "roast chicken," but I like "lemon-butt chicken" better. Because that's what you do--you put a hot lemon inside the chicken before you roast it, and it is SO delicious.

Here's what you need:
-a free-range organic chicken (somewhere in the range of 4-6 lb)
-sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
-potatoes, cut into golf ball-sized pieces (I used 6 or 7 Yukon Golds--he says you should use 4.5 lbs of potatoes, but this is WAY too much)
-1 large lemon (preferably unwaxed)
-1 whole bulb of garlic, broken into cloves
-handful of fresh thyme (little branches and all)
-olive oil
-small handful of rosemary (I used dried)

And here's what you do:
-In the morning, rub the chicken inside and out with salt and pepper. Cover it and put it in the fridge.
-When you're ready to start cooking, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Boil a large pot of salted water, and boil the potatoes, lemon, and garlic cloves for 12 minutes. Drain and allow to steam dry for 1 minute, and then put the potatoes back into the hot pot and toss around. (He says this helps the potatoes get crispy and "chuffed". [Oh, he's so cute!])
-Pat the chicken with paper towels and rub it with olive oil. Then stab the hot lemon about 10 times and put the lemon, garlic cloves, and thyme into the cavity (AKA, the "chicken butt"). Put the chicken into a roasting pan and cook for 45 minutes.
-After 45 minutes, put the chicken on a plate, and toss the potatoes and rosemary into the roasting pan with the yummy chicken fat that's cooked out. Make a gap in the center of the potatoes and put the chicken back in, and cook for another 45 minutes or so, or until the chicken's done.
-Let the chicken sit for a few minutes before carving (this keeps more juices inside). You can squeeze the garlic cloves out of the skins and eat this with the chicken and potatoes. Sooooo good.

Onion-cheese tart: This recipe came from Nigel Slater's Appetite. Ooh! I just realized that you can search inside this book on Amazon, so here are the recipe pages: page one, page two. This was great (I used yellow onions and fontina cheese)--but I'd recommend adding some salt and pepper to the tart before baking. Also, the puff pastry that I bought turned out to come in squares instead of one large sheet, so I made tartlets. This would be great as an appetizer for a fancy dinner party.

Instead, a group of us ate it for dinner (along with delicious potato chips, cookies, brownies, and Smarties [!]) at a decidedly unfancy board game party where we played the Trivial Pursuit 20th Anniversary edition and one of my favorite board games ever, Taboo. I love to work the buzzer.