Sticky Lemon Chicken
June 17, 2008 by Tracey Thompson
Filed under Recipes
image: Tracey Thompson, 2008
I haven’t purchased Gordon Ramsay’s new cookbook, Fast Food, but I plan on it. I recently tried his Sticky Lemon Chicken he showed on Rachael Ray. It was very good and very easy. Just a couple of notes.
I hate cutting up whole chickens and when I went to the store they didn’t have any whole chickens pre-cut, so I just grabbed some chicken thighs. Really any cut of chicken will work, but you need the skin on it. The skin is what the sauce sticks too. If you are freaked out by that just remember a little thing known as portion control. I also don’t own a mandolin. I just cut the lemons as thin as I could by hand. Some were a little chunky, but that is ok. You want them thin because you can actually eat them if you wish, but the flavor is the big thing.
Now I am notorious for not reading through a recipe completely before I start to cook. I am also notorious about being a little nervous if I don’t follow the recipe. The Sticky Lemon Chicken recipe over at the website has a few kinks in it. For example, the recipe suddenly tells you to return the chicken to the pan, but it never told you to take it out. I would say that this stumble is due to a poor job from the Ray site and not Ramsay’s top selling cookbook. I wish the website would provide video of the cooking segments in the show…like Martha Stewart does. I hate when you watch a show, get excited about the recipe, download it, start to cook and say, “Hey, wait a minute…this isn’t what they did on the show!”
I never took the chicken out of the pot. I initially had the heat up a little higher with the oil, thyme and garlic to brown the chicken, then I turned things down and continued the recipe. You could actually experiment with this recipe a little and you probably wouldn’t screw it up. The meal turned out great and this makes for some great leftovers.
Ramsay served this with green beans, a vegetable that is not a big hit in our house. I roasted some carrots (courtesy of the Barefoot Contessa) in the oven and everyone gave the meal a thumbs up.
From Ina Garten
Recipe Summary
Difficulty: Easy
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Inactive Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 20 minutes
Yield: 6 servings12 carrots
3 tablespoons good olive oil
1 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons minced fresh dill or parsley Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. If the carrots are thick, cut them in half lengthwise; if not, leave whole. Slice the carrots diagonally in 1 1/2-inch-thick slices. (The carrots will shrink while cooking so make the slices big.) Toss them in a bowl with the olive oil, salt, and pepper. Transfer to a sheet pan in 1 layer and roast in the oven for 20 minutes, until browned and tender.Toss the carrots with minced dill or parsley, season to taste, and serve.
There is a video of this recipe over at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/gordon_ramsay/article1660232.ece
He serves it with champ (mash potato and chopped green onion) Very GOOD!
Not sure why you took me off your website, other than the fact that I said you were somewhat stupid about your review of Gordon Ramsey. Think you better than him, I don’t think so, , , think you’re better than me because you think you’re better him, fuk u!
‘don’t own a mandolin and cut them as thin as I could, frig girl, I could cut them thinner with an axe.
Wayne, yer an A$$, shuddup.
Personally i made this recipe, and yes i had to cut the lemons by hand too. I agree with tracey, they are somewhat chunky doing it that way, but an alternative to a mandolin, could be to fit your food processor with a slicing blade.
The only flaw i noticed in the recipe from rachael rays site was that it didn’t say how much sherry to add, so i gave it a dang good splash.
This is truly a delicious recipe. I would love to own a cookbook or two of gordons. I just made a beef stew from channel 4, and it was amazing.
The reason the recipe mentions returning the chicken to the pan is because they say if you can’t fit all the chicken in the pan to brown it, to do it in batches. So, if you browned the chicken in batches, you should return all of it to the pan after all the pieces are browned; if you didn’t brown in batches, the step does not apply.