Nirvana from roasted chicken?

I've been on the search for the perfect roasted lemon chicken for years. At first I didn't realize it. I had eaten a few lemon chickens and nothing stood out. I made a different one and thought, "Oooh, this is good. I'll remember this." A few months later when I had a hankering for lemon-chicken, do you think I could find the source? I had no idea if it was an article, a cookbook, a news-clipping. Rats! Of course, I thought it would be easy to find another one or dream up my own. Not true, Zola dear.

Instead I've had the lemon-chicken blues. No recipe or wild idea got me the results I was looking for. I didn't want to just smell lemon. I wanted to taste it IN the meat! Despite all those Perdue chicken commercials and the Perdue owner's fascination with yellow, a yellow chicken does not give you lemon flavor. You have to ADD it.

I tried stuffing the chicken with lemons--whole or cut in half or even in bits. I tried cutting bits and putting them under the skin with butter. I tried glazing with lemon sauces. None of the ideas worked. The lemon flavoring ended up in the bottom of the pan. I became an ace at lemon-chicken a jus, but I had failed at lemon chicken.

Until now.

I don't know how this worked but I'm thrilled. This time I did a very simple onion-roasted chicken and added the fresh parsley tucked under the skin. That parsley imparted a very Italian feel to the chicken. And easily enough, right before the roasting was done and the chicken already had a beautiful crisp skin, I drizzled fresh lemon over the chicken and put it back in to roast the rest of the way. Lo and behold, the lemon flavor STUCK to the chicken instead of rolling off. It must have had something to do with the fact that the chicken was almost done. Even the first bites of meat had a lemon flavor to them as I carved. Yippee! And then to top it all off, at the last second I drizzled more lemon juice over the meat on the serving plate. You'd normally think that would be sour overkill. Instead it was lemon chicken nirvana.

Enjoy!

Serving suggestion: To round out the meal I suggest serving this with Parmesan-Black Pepper Mashed Potatoes (http://www.apexperformancesystems.com/recipe/00000064). The cool thing these days is to put the potatoes under the meat on the plate. A side dish that would be great is Zucchini-Tomato Strata (http://www.apexperformancesystems.com/recipe/00000066). You can choose your own dessert to go with this too (http://www.apexperformancesystems.com/recipes/005?PHPSESSID=d470ac1c80327b06b77aea2ac613b6a0)!

Lemon-Onion Chicken

Serves 2 to 4 depending on portion size and whether any guests like the dark meat. I use one small chicken per couple and save the leftovers for other things.

2 Tbl butter
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic minced (jar garlic is fine)
3 tsp minced, fresh, Italian parsley
1 roasting chicken, 3 to 4 pounds
1 large lemon

Loosen the skin on the chicken breast with your fingers so you can get under it and "stuff the skin." If you have fingernails, be careful or you'll have pierced chicken skin and things will leak out.

Put a tablespoon of butter under each side. A cold pat of butter works fine.

Mix onion powder, garlic and minced fresh parsley and then stuff that mixture under the skin on both sides too.

Season skin with salt and pepper if you like.

Roast the chicken at 350 degrees for approximately one hour. (Follow the directions on the chicken package for roasting instructions. It depends on the size of chicken you bought.)

Ten minutes before the scheduled finish time, squeeze one-half of the lemon over the chicken. Just drizzle all over the top of the chicken. Put the chicken back in oven for ten more minutes until roasting is complete.

When you have the slices of breast meat on the plates, squeeze the last half of the lemon over the slices.