The Easiest Fall Chicken Dinner You Will Ever Make

Today we're gonna make an easy fall dish. It's maple roasted chicken with root vegetables and roasted garlic. I think you're gonna love it. All right, so let's go over the ingredients quickly. I have four bone-in skin-on chicken thighs and I have six chicken legs. You can use all chicken thighs for this or you can use all legs for it. But I would just use dark meat chicken because you can roast it to a higher temperature, 185 Fahrenheit minimum, but even more is great. Chicken will be fall apart tender. If you use breast meat, I'm gonna say this now because often there are people who ask, they say they don't like dark meat. The recipe will be different. I would still use bone-on chicken breasts but I would put them in far later into the roasting process. Okay, we'll go over that a little bit more later. We're gonna marinate this chicken in three tablespoons of maple syrup, a quarter cup of balsamic vinegar, half a cup of dry white wine, quarter cup of olive oil, two teaspoons of Dijon mustard and two teaspoons of diamond crystal kosher salt. That's our whole entire marinade component. Two hours in the fridge is minimum I would do but I would do this overnight, it will be better. After the chicken comes out, we're gonna toss all these roasted root vegetables that we're gonna make. This is three Yukon gold potatoes that I just chopped into fairly large pieces, two large carrots that I chopped into pieces like so and two to three parsnips that I chopped into pieces like so. So they're all roughly the same size. They're all gonna roast roughly at the same time. We'll start roasting them a little bit before we put the chicken on. I also have a pound of Brussels sprouts that we're gonna throw into the mix too. If you don't like Brussels sprouts, you can remove them. And this is a very flexible recipe. You can use more of any vegetable that you like or if the store doesn't have one, you're fine too. Three heads of garlic, we're gonna slice the top off of it and we're gonna roast them with everything. So we're gonna have nice roasted garlic that everybody can serve on their own plate or you can just squeeze them all out, put it on top at the end. It makes it really delicious. And then I have one more tablespoon of maple syrup and that we're gonna do at the end. After our chicken gets nicely cooked and roasted, we'll just glaze a little bit on top and that really just finishes off the dish. This is a great dish for Friendsgiving, I would say. It has basically all those four flavors and it's a heck of a lot easier than doing the full turkey dinner and everything. Okay, so these chicken thighs I just put in the fridge overnight and it dries them out a little bit. It takes off a lot of the excess moisture. I didn't clean them up. Now you can clean them up before you do this. I just wanted to show you now. So the way these are all machined on, even the most premium chicken now, it's all done by machine, okay? And then they wanna sell you all the excess overhanging skin. So you can keep this skin and do something else with it. You could fry it up, but for the dish, we don't want that much overhanging skin. Okay, same thing here. All right, so we're just gonna just take off some of it. And now we have a nicer, more prepped chicken thigh. All right, I'll just repeat that for the other four that I have. It's always like this. Okay, and then for the marinade, you could just put it all in here. And honestly, it's easier just to throw this all in a blender, but I'm just gonna whisk it in here because I'm gonna throw the chicken into this bowl to marinate it. So I don't have to dirty my blender. That's three tablespoons of maple syrup, two teaspoons of Dijon mustard, two teaspoons diamond crystal kosher salt, half a cup dry white wine. What if someone can't have wine? I would just take it out and add chicken stock. That's what I would do. Yeah, I would add a half a cup of chicken stock then. What about like an apple cider? So I haven't played around with the exact measurements. I probably would do less. I wouldn't do a half a cup of apple cider in it, but same thing with apple cider vinegar. They could use two, like maybe a couple tablespoons of that and then chicken stock. Yeah, I'm just thinking for like the acid. Yeah, so the cider vinegar would work well. That's a quarter cup of balsamic. And then I'm just gonna put in a quarter cup of olive oil. Okay, and then just whisk this up. And if you put it in a blender, it's gonna emulsify more. It's not really a big deal though because it's all going to go on the chicken and we're gonna use all of this for roasting our vegetables. So if you like main course recipes, which I'm sure you do because you're watching this video, I wanna let you know about our new cookbook, Sip and Feast Family Favorites. It has plenty of main courses in there. In addition to that, it has all the other sections you would expect to find in a cookbook. It is a beautiful cookbook, 256 pages, over 100 recipes, beautiful photo, nice instructions, good story in every single recipe. It has U.S. customary and metric measurements. So everybody will be able to follow along with these easy recipes. Right above you is the link where you can buy it. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other sellers. QR code if you're watching on TV, which I'm increasingly aware that the majority of you are watching on TV. It's also pinned in the comments and in the description. If you don't like cookbooks, you just like watching our videos, buy it for a friend or family who does. Thanks. So chicken, we didn't do anything with the legs. The legs are just as is. All right, so I'm just putting it in here. Just get them all coated. If you have a plastic bag, they'll get more even coating, I would say. But we'll get most of it in here submerged. Yeah, if you do it overnight and you do it in a bowl, just come back to it after halfway and then just flip all the chicken over. But two hours is good. All right, so I'm gonna wrap this up and stick this right in the fridge. Okay, so it's been over two hours for the chicken. We just filmed another video in between it. That's what we do on marinating days. This isn't like the old Food Network where they have like 16 ready-made dishes. Remember that? They used to open the oven and push it through the oven on the other side, the fake oven they had, and then they had the real one. Now the Food Network doesn't even have cooking on it. It's ridiculous. This is the last thing you have to do. Oven's at 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Set it for the middle rack. And then the garlic here, we're just gonna just make sure you have a sharp knife and then just cut off the top here. Okay, just like one strike through. This garlic's not the best. It's seen better days. You could always tell the garlic's not the best if it has green in the middle, okay? But we're gonna use this whole thing. It's fine. We just don't want it to be, if there's any like rotted cloves, then I would just go to another head. All right, and we'll just do the same thing for the other two. The other thing is I made a dish recently, rosemary chicken and sausage. Really popular one. People love it. If you haven't seen that one, I recommend you watch it. And we did the same thing with the garlic. And there were a few comments that like, you're sticking that dirty garlic head at the bottom, you know, inside of it. So give it a little rinse and then just remove these outside areas if you want. Okay, that's what I recommend you do. Doing it this way makes it look really beautiful. Okay, we've got another good head again with the green still, but at least it's not rotted. Okay, that's all you gotta do. The remaining garlic here, you could throw these other side if you want. It kind of comes apart, but you could throw it also in there or you could just use it for more garlic. You know, just take them out and cut it up. All right, that's my oven, 425 Fahrenheit. This is a baking pan, high walled half sheet baking pan. So that means it's 13 by 18. And this will allow you to do everything. And I like having a high wall so you don't get a ton of splattering in your oven, which to me is important. Okay, here are our vegetables. This is a combination of potatoes, carrots, and parsnips. I feel like parsnips don't get any love, you know? And I wanna have like enough to fill up my pan, but not enough that I have like two levels. So that's why this pan is really good. Any excess moisture, you could try to blot up. So we're gonna put about a half a cup, not a half a cup, about a quarter cup of olive oil, but how much oil do you need? You need enough to coat these and get some love on both sides. Okay, this is our sage and thyme mixture. It's two teaspoons of both. It's a very fall dish. Okay, I'm gonna use a little bit of salt here, not too much, because we're gonna have all the marinade ingredients go on it in about 25 minutes. Okay, some black pepper too. Put on your bro gloves or just go in like I'm doing. All right, we wanna get everything coated. So I like to take the potatoes and just keep them down, like cut side down, but you know, you don't have to, you don't have to go crazy like that if you don't want to. So make a little bit of room. Get your garlic heads. Okay, and I'll put like one here, put one over here and then one right there. Okay, it looks pretty good. Then just take a little bit of olive oil and into the head, like all the exposed garlic. Okay, and that's gonna help it roast. We're gonna have beautiful roasted garlic in this. But what I love about doing a dish like this with roasted garlic is that if you don't like the garlic, it's not really gonna permeate the rest of the dish. But I'm telling you, I'm a random to anybody who doesn't love all this roasted garlic. It's so good. All right, so all we have to do is throw this in the oven for 25 minutes at 425 Fahrenheit. We're par cooking these to get a headstart on our chicken. Okay, so that's 25 minutes. And I just like to do that to give the vegetables a headstart. Parsnips are very hard. They probably take the longest to roast, but it's not gonna matter as long as everything, meaning the parsnips and everything else is nice and tender. And they will be after another hour of cooking. You know, you can use parchment paper if you want because you're gonna get a little sticking with these potatoes, but it's not the worst thing in the world. All right, so everything is pretty much distributed evenly. Gonna put the Brussels sprouts in. Now, what I did for the Brussels sprouts, I don't think I mentioned it. The really large ones I cut in half and then the smaller ones I just left whole. And that's one pound of Brussels sprouts. All right, so we're just gonna take the chicken and we're gonna arrange it all over. I said in the beginning, you can use all legs if you want. You can use all thighs if you want. If you're gonna use bone-in chicken breasts, I would just wait to put on the chicken until probably the last 30 minutes or so. And I would cook the chicken to 160 degrees Fahrenheit internal. I'm not a big fan of white meat for any of these type of dishes. And put the chicken thighs skin side up. I'm just gonna take the marinade and pour it over everything. You can put a little bit more oil in your garlic. Put it in the oven for 10 more minutes at that 425. After 10 minutes, just lower the heat to 375 Fahrenheit and let it cook for another 45 minutes to an hour until the chicken gets really tender and minimum temp of 185 degrees Fahrenheit internal. But you can put this up, you can cook it much longer. There is a point where you'll ruin it. That's probably about two hours. So you have plenty of leeway here. You can't really screw this up. Okay, so look at that, how good that looks. So that went for 10 minutes at the 425 and then another 45 minutes at 375. That doesn't count. We roasted the vegetables, the harder vegetables initially for 25 minutes. So basically everything gets really sticky at the bottom here. See like it's nice and sticky, like right over here. And with having the wine and the liquid from the vegetables, we have enough at the bottom where it didn't get overly dried out. What you can do now is depending on how your chicken looks, you can glaze it with that extra tablespoon of maple syrup. This looks great already. And a lot of that's gonna be contingent on how long you marinate your chicken for. Check the temperature on this chicken. Just check it by, so it's like 190, 195. Yeah, it's gonna keep going up. So these are beautifully tender. Now, if you don't have enough color here and you've cooked it long enough, maybe your oven's a little off or maybe chicken was a little overly wet, you can glaze it up. And I'm gonna do that anyway. Give it that extra punch that I like. So I just have one tablespoon of maple syrup and I'm just gonna put a little bit on top of each one. Now, again, if it's very light, your chicken, you can turn your broiler on, but you gotta watch very carefully because this will burn in a matter of seconds. So you're only gonna need like 35, 45 seconds and you just need one tablespoon. I'm just putting it on the chicken, but you could brush it on some of the vegetables too, if you like. So I don't even need to broil it. I could just throw it back in the oven for a couple more minutes. Okay, here it is. It looks delicious. I mean, smells so good. One thing you can check, if your vegetables, if your potatoes, if your parsnips, they're gonna be the most important ones. Parsnips are nice and tender. Carrots, potatoes, everything's good. If they're not tender enough at this point and your chicken's completely beautiful like this, you can just remove your chicken to a plate and just throw everything back in the oven for another 10 or 20 minutes or until everything is tender. It's like glaze at the bottom of the pan here. Like, you know, you just dip in. It's so good. Now, what I like to do with a chicken like this, I like to let it set for about 10 minutes and you can just put everything on a platter, kind of like toss those vegetables together one more time with the beautiful sauce. But I think I'll just save this like this and we'll serve this up to the taste tester right from here so we can have a couple of pieces. All right, James. All right, also, I don't really like parsnip. Tastes weird. All right, well, why don't you see what you think now? I just don't really like it that much. Okay. This one's going well. Carrots are pretty good. Mm. Okay, the potato's really good. You like the glaze on it? Yeah, it's pretty good. I mean, I think that chicken looks phenomenal. I know. Oh, I didn't give you any roasted garlic either. I think they got a little sticky with the glaze, but. It's good. Okay. Here you go. It's a little too mush for me. The garlic. The garlic too much? Too much roasted garlic? Yeah. Well, you could spread that, like, spread it on bread or whatnot. Yeah, it'd probably be good on bread. Okay, this is my opinion on this. Yeah. So, that just happens to be a really good piece of chicken. Like, it's just like really like juicy. But I'm not a big fan of this dish in general. I mean, basic isn't bad. Like, pasta marinara is like one of my favorite things. That's like the most basic you can get. But it's so like basic and like, I don't like parsnip. The Brussels sprouts are like, all right, there's not really flavored a lot. It just tastes like a Brussels sprout with nothing on it. The carrots and the potatoes are pretty good. Kind of like soaked up that flavor. But the chicken, like. Well, they can toss everything together. But the chicken, I don't get any flavor from it, honestly. All I taste is just chicken. And that's not like bad, but I think you want some flavor on your chicken. You don't taste any flavor on that chicken? Like barely anything. Well, a little concerned. This one seems that it might be worse than the other rating that I got. I did like this potato. All right, well, things are not looking up right for this one. What would you do to improve this? You gave me a six on the lasagna soup and you devoured the plate. This is worse than a lasagna soup. And it's not like I wouldn't eat it. I eat basically everything he makes. He's gonna glaze it right now. He's gonna be like, oh, it's the best thing I've ever had. It is. Tara, I know you don't want to be on camera. All right, that's a carrot for you. You gotta help me out here. Yeah, it's delicious. I'm gonna give this a six too, but not as good of a six as the lasagna soup got. Honestly, I think I would change my rating of the lasagna soup to a six and a half. Okay. And this is a six. Well, okay, so what would you do? Do you think anything could improve this dish? You're not a fan of roast chicken with vegetables? No, I love roast chicken and vegetables. I don't like the maple. That's what he's criticizing. I'd rather eat a rotisserie chicken with some saffron rice. Well, that sounds delicious too. Maybe I'll make that for another video and hopefully you won't give that one a six. That's my favorite type of roasted chicken. Listen, I think they respect your ratings. I'm curious to see what you say in the comments. I mean, you see how it looks. I mean, he said the chicken has no taste. It looks really good. It looks like really appealing, but like. You don't taste the maple syrup or anything? I taste a little bit of it. I taste it more. I mean, I'm getting it all from the vegetables. I taste it on the potatoes and the carrots. I don't really taste anything on the chicken and the chicken's the main part. Anyway, this was a very easy video to make. I do think your family will love it regardless of what this guy says here. I still like this, but when I read it, because when I read it like something a six, like it's not that I don't like it. It's like, if I don't like something, I'll be rating it below like a four or below. Okay. People like you're giving lower ratings now and I think they're tuning in to see what you're giving as the rating. All right, we'll see you next time.