Sometimes We Cook on Friday!

Friday is the toughest day for teachers because the exhaustion of the entire week hits hard on Friday around 5PM.  I was really smart and always had a quiz on Friday followed by an independent extra-credit activity so my students knew what to expect and would be calm-ish, cool-ish, and collected-ish.  Jeffy teaches middle school and has adopted my weekly schedule for the most part, so he tries to do a quiz on Friday as well, but he teaches at a charter school, which means longer hours.  He wakes up a little before 6AM, bikes to work, teaches from 8 until 4 (most days he goes three hours straight until 11AM, which takes a lot out of you with sixth graders!), then bikes around Central Park or over to New Jersey to relax a bit after the stress of the day.  It is a long day.  On Friday he normally ends up in bed before 9PM, so we tend to make leftovers.

Not this week!  We cooked a "simple weeknight meal" that we saw Daphne Oz make on The Chew.  Her recipe called for boneless, skinless chicken thighs, but don't ya know there was a run on those last weekend at Trader Joe's?  We used a family pack of bone-in split breasts and drumsticks with skin.  We could have skinned them ourselves and you can certainly do that yourself if you want to make it leaner, but we do not eat much fat during the day anyway other than healthy fats like Jeffy's copious consumption of peanut butter sandwiches or bagels, so we can splurge on the delicious skin.

So, we used bone-in split breasts and drumsticks, then we chopped carrots, fennel, onion, red onion (we had it leftover from our burger night, so why not use it?), and washed teeny-tiny potatoes (that is what the label says at Trader Joe's and they are delicious even if they are slightly smaller than fingerling potatoes, so we did not slice them in half).  We put most of the veggies in a large glass bowl and tossed them in some olive oil and the fennel fronds.  We actually could not fit all of the veggies in one glass bowl, so I dumped them onto prepared cookie sheets (aluminum foil means less dishes....) and put the rest of the veggies in the bowl for their olive oil bath.  We placed the chicken in the center of the cookie sheets (we have a rather small oven - I had to measure it when I was shopping for cookie sheets! - so both cookie sheets was a must for this recipe), spread the veggies around the side, then drizzled more olive oil on the veggies and rubbed some onto the chicken.  We salted, peppered, and sprinkled a little garlic powder over the entire concoction.  We also added the zest and juice of a whole lemon and, at the last minute we realized we had some leftover fresh rosemary and tossed that on top!  We put it all in at 400 degrees and cooked it for 55 minutes.  It took a little longer than the recipe calls for because we used the bone-in meat instead.

It looked like this:

While we were scarfing this delicious, fresh meal down on a Friday night (!), we realized it would take even less time to assemble if you prepared the veggies ahead of time.  If you chop your veggies the day you buy them and put them in Ziploc baggies or Tupperware in the fridge, you could have this meal prepped in two minutes and on the table in an hour!  It only took us a few minutes to chop as it was, so it was really simple anyway!

The recipe (remember, we used bone-in chicken, so we had to extend the cooking time, and we added carrots and rosemary) is here:

Daphne Oz's Sheet Pan Chicken and Veggies - The Chew


We definitely plan on using this recipe often because it was so simple and so delicious (as long as you use enough salt and pepper!)!