Guest Blogger Post: Michelle Shares a Great Quick Dinner

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My friend Michelle works full time, has three children and continues to impress me with the dinners she puts out night after night. She started a blog called Conrad Family Weekly Dinners to post their weekly meal plans, share recipes, and inspire others to cook delicious dinners for their families. Managing full time work, three kids, a household and homemade dinners is not an easy task. She says the trick to managing meals is planning ahead (agreed). She told me about this dinner she made and I said it looked so good it had to do a guest blogger post. So here it is...

(Thanks Michelle!)

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Over the past couple years our family has fallen in love with roast chicken dinners. We adore several things about this meal – it’s delicious, inexpensive, easy to prepare, usually always provides leftovers and it makes your house smell great.

As a full time working mom of three, I search out recipes that I can prep the night or morning prior that use some of my favorite ingredients which we always have on hand – fresh herbs, garlic, olive oil and lemon or lime juice. I came across this recipe and video for Quick Roast Chicken & Potatoes from Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP newsletter (sign up if you haven’t already). I knew I needed to prepare this ASAP along with a recipe for Garlic butter roasted mushrooms that I recently saw on Smitten Kitchen.

Here is the menu I served up for our Monday night dinner:

Quick oven roast chicken and potatoes (with carrots added) and Garlic butter roasted mushrooms

Sunday afternoon while the kids were napping, I prepared the chicken and cut out the back (never had done that before and it was super easy with a good pair of kitchen scissors). I tucked herbs in the chicken that were still alive (barely) in the backyard – thyme and rosemary springs, set it in the pan, covered with foil and placed in the fridge until the next day. (this took all about 10 minutes) When I arrived home on Monday at 5:15pm, I tossed in the whole garlic cloves (Trader Joe’s has these already peeled for you in the fridge section), sliced the potatoes really quick (I deviated from the recipe a bit as I didn’t have time or energy to peel and poach potatoes so I just sliced up fingerling potatoes lengthwise and left the skins on). I also threw in some carrots as I knew the kids wouldn’t be too fond of the mushrooms), squirted some lemon juice and olive oil over everything and tossed it in the oven following the recipe instructions.

Then came the mushrooms which I was pretty giddy about preparing. I placed the mushrooms in the pan right after the chicken went into the oven. Drizzled the oil over them along with some chopped garlic, lemon juice and butter before throwing it in the oven. OMG – these were delicious!

We all sat down at 6:00pm to a yummy meal that took 45 minutes to prepare and that cost me $14.00. What could be better than that?


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