Today’s recipe finds its origins in my (actually, Raven’s) cookbook Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. I love this cookbook, by the way. The recipes are sensible, tasty, and not too fiddly. Raven got this cookbook and I got the 50th Anniversary edition of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking for Christmas a few years ago. I have not yet gotten up the guts to try my cookbook. Somehow Julia Child’s book seems intimidating and fancy, and Hazan’s seems more comfortable and less demanding and exacting. Maybe that’s just in my head.

This particular recipe calls for the chicken to be quartered and then pan-roasted, but I used my dutch oven instead. Mostly, because I love my dutch oven. The only seasonings are garlic and rosemary (and of course salt and pepper). I know the pot got crowded, and next time I think I would use one of our cast iron pans and its lid, since it has more room across the bottom.

It didn’t look too bad after it got browned, though. Once the browning was done the garlic, rosemary, and white wine got added (I put in A LOT more garlic, rosemary, and wine than the recipe called for. I have no regrets). As you can see from the picture, I used a good deal of garlic powder (which the recipe does not call for), as well as putting in a few more cloves of garlic than the recipe called for. I like garlic. I also added more wine instead of the water that the recipe called for when the liquid in the pot got low. This chicken ended up with about half a bottle of wine cooked into it.

It took a few hours for the chicken to get done, and it spent the whole time covered, so I put it on a sheet pan under the broiler for a few minutes to crisp up the skin a bit. I highly recommend this step if you like the skin, it made it really crispy and tasty. The recipe said to cook the chicken until it was falling apart, which I did. I am a bit divided over this, but Mom and Raven liked it, so it worked. Turns out the crispy bits that stuck to the bottom of the pan at the end were REALLY tasty! So yeah, a bigger pan to allow more crispy bits would be good.

Three we are, one quarter of a chicken with rosemary and garlic. The sauce from deglazing the pan tasted a bit burnt so I didn’t put it on the chicken, but on the whole this ended up as a simple, tasty chicken dinner. This one is worth trying again.