Chicken Tray Bake

If you’re tight for time and want something that’s tasty and easy to prepare, look no further than this easy chicken tray bake! We love this recipe because of it’s adaptability – you can choose to roast any vegetables you like alongside the juicy chicken thighs. Just make sure you cut the vegetables to size in proportion to their hardness so everything cooks at the same time.

Ingredients: Serves four for a light dinner.

Eight medium to large skin on, bone in chicken thighs
Vegetables of your choice – to give an idea, this is what we used –
2 medium to large carrots
1 courgette
2 red onions
2 parsnips
1 yellow pepper
1 bulb of garlic
2 hard tomatoes
8-10 new potatoes – if you want roast potatoes. Otherwise you can omit and serve with mash.
6 springs rosemary
Chilli flakes
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil

Method

1. Cut the vegetables. This is by no means an exact science, but we cut hard vegetables to be smaller than the soft ones i.e. make the carrot slices half the thickness of the courgette. When cutting the onion, leave the root attached so the onion stays in tact when you cut it into quarters. Chop the tomatoes in half. Cut the parsnips into wedges. Add the garlic cloves with their skin on (they will become soft and sweet and will pop out of their skin when roasted).
2. You can roast the potatoes in a separate tray if you want them to be crispy. Chop each potato in half and coat with a bit of olive oil. Season with sea salt, pepper, and the leaves from two rosemary sprigs. If you want to roast them in the same tray, ignore the above step and jump to step 3 after cutting the potatoes in half. In this case they will be just as flavorsome, but will have less of a crispy skin.
3. Add around 2 tablespoons of olive oil to the vegetables, season with sea salt, pepper, chilli flakes, and the leaves from all of the remaining rosemary sprigs. Mix and set aside. The reason we only use a little oil is the juices from the chicken will help flavour and cook the vegetables.
4. Trim the excess fat off the sides of each chicken thigh. Season with salt, pepper, and a dusting of paprika. Rub it in. You can also add dried herbs of your choice too.
5. Place the chicken thighs on top of the vegetables, and roast for around 45 minutes. Pre heat the oven to 200C, and turn down to 180C as soon as you put the tray in. Check after 45 minutes that the vegetables are cooked enough to your preference, and the chicken juices run clear. It is pretty hard to overcook chicken thighs, unlike chicken breast.
6. Serve with a pouring of the roasting juices. As mentioned above, you can omit the roast potatoes and serve this with mash, or roast sweet potatoes, or any side of your choice.