Spatchcock Skillet Chicken Sour Cherry Smoky Lemon Sweet Garlic Greeny Grains Yoghurt

a dozen great words for your dinner, plus two chunky revelations

Hi, sweet babes! It’s Thursday and the week is nearly done and you have done so well.

Listen: this is your fancy-easy dinner sorted. This is 12 great words, most of them roasted, to convey to you a sense of a completely easy, completely gorgeous, fancy-feeling dinner. I used this jar of cherry harissa and I adored it, 10/10, would buy again. But you don’t have to! You never have to do anything!

Here is what I wrote about it in my last email, as a kind of teaser:

Here’s the deal: spatchcock a chicken (easy, I will show you how) and shove it in a skillet. Slather it in a paste made mainly of shop-bought harissa with some extra garlic (and pomegranate molasses if you can’t get the cherry harissa I use). Let it marinade while you go to the pub. Roast high for an hour— accompanied, in the oven, by a lemon and a bulb of garlic. Cook some grains; tear some herbs; blitz the smoky roast lemon and the sweet sticky roast garlic in the blender and fold through some Greek yoghurt. You will simply: lose your mind for this. We cannot get over it.

It is unreal, and such minimal faff for maximum fun. Also, cooks in one hour. Any kind of roast chicken is perfect for this time of year, IMO; but this was god tier, the kind of recipe that reminds me why I got into this game.

If the word “spatchcocking” freaks you out, don’t let it. It’s fine. You just use regular scissors (obviously you don’t own poultry shears, nor do I) and it takes 2 minutes and you will be absolutely fine. Alternatively, you can just not do it, and it will just take a little longer to roast your chicken and be less spectacular. If you want less spectacular, that’s on you!!! No, really though. It will be fine either way. And if it isn’t fine, ok?