Chicken with Lemon and Thyme

I love to try and get my eldest son AB involved in preparing the dinner as much as possible.  The temptation can often be to think “I’ll just do it myself, it will be easier/quicker/not require the whole kitchen floor to be mopped afterwards!”  However, I believe that the more children are involved in preparing a meal, the more of an interest they will take in food.  Often parents think that the only way a child can help in the kitchen is if they are making cakes and biscuits. Whilst that certainly has its place (and is a huge amount of fun!) it does concern me a little that some children might think that all good food made in the kitchen has sugar, butter, chocolate etc in.  What better way of getting a child to try something that they haven’t had or liked before than by getting them to have a hand in its preparation?

With this chicken recipe I got AB to help me make the marinade that goes on to the chicken (he is still a bit too young to be using a hot oven).  Firstly I got him to take the leaves off of a few sprigs of thyme – probably 10 or so small ones.

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I then quartered a lemon and got him to squeeze all the juice in (doesn’t matter if the pips go in) followed by some salt and pepper.

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I then finished the marinade by adding a good glug of olive oil and two smashed cloves of garlic, skin on.  There is normally an argument as to who gets the garlic after roasting, they taste divine if roasted in their skins!  The 6 chicken thighs then had the skin slashed a few times and placed into the bowl with the marinade.  I gave it a good mix around with my hands and left it for half an hour before roasting in an oven for 45 mins, 200oC fan.  I served this with some potato wedges and some green vegetables, but you could really serve this chicken with almost any accompaniments.  The marinade itself is not set in stone either, again one of those things that you can experiment with by substituting or adding ingredients as you wished.

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mr b cooks

I'm a stay at home dad who cooks for his family. I'm passionate about preparing healthy food, that is simple and quick to make. My blog aims to share some of these recipes and ideas with you!

5 thoughts on “Chicken with Lemon and Thyme”

    1. Hi, I am currently marinading my chicken. Two questions 1) is there a time limit of marinading? 2) how do you roast it? Do you pour the bowl into a roasting dish or do you remove the chicken and just put that into the oven? Thanks in advance 🙂

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      1. Hi Cheri
        Thanks for your message. With this marinade I tend to leave it up to an hour at room temperature covered up, if I wanted to leave it any longer then it would need to go into the fridge and I probably wouldn’t leave it in there for longer than 24 hours. Personally I have never left it marinading for that long (I’m rarely organised enough to be planning dinner that far in advance!) but I don’t see why it would be a problem. Main thing of course as with all chicken dishes is to check it is properly cooked through.
        I tend to pour the whole lot into a roasting dish (which I line with foil to save on washing up!). There isn’t much excess marinade with this so I have never found it a problem to put the whole lot in.
        Enjoy! I’d be delighted if you could let me know how it turns out 🙂
        Mr B

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  2. Thank you so much for your reply. It will only be marinading for a maximum of 3hrs so im glad it will be okay. I will definitely let you know how it tastes and might even add a picture to your thread on netmums 🙂

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