John's Tuscan Brick Chicken with Charred Lemons

I decided to make a thing of it and do 3 recipes at once for dinner tonight. To spare you a never ending post and a ridiculously long title, I'll be posting these recipes separately.

This recipe requires a trip to Home Depot or, for me, my backyard. When we bought this house the previous owners left a nice pile of bricks behind. There was nothing brick at all anywhere that would have explained why they were there...they were just there. They also thought they'd be nice and leave a random tire in our backyard as well. Anyway, I grabbed two bricks from the pile, took them inside and washed them off. I noticed these were going to be a bit too big for my skillet, so I waited until the baby went down for a nap, headed to the garage, put on my husband's rubber boots and went in search of something to break these suckers in half. I grabbed a hammer and Calvin and I went to town. A few seconds later, I had pan sized bricks.

I'm glad I read this recipe beforehand, because it requires preparation and several hours of hanging out in the fridge. (The chicken, not me) The rub for this smells amazing and I will keep it in handy for other chicken recipes - particularly baked chicken. Once the rub is on the chicken, you're left with only 2 ingredients to use before this recipe is done. I like this because it's easy cleanup.

Alright. So. This started out seemly like a slam dunk recipe. Then I put my chickens in the pan. I must have bought some monster chickens because they barely fit.

All bricked up

Another thing I found was once these babies are in the pan, it's Snap, Crackle and Pop time. These things will pop you worse than bacon, so be careful. Flipping them over was a ticking time bomb. So. Because I had monster chickens, the cook time was off. So off, in fact, that I added about 5-8 minutes on top of the usual cook time, which was fine. No big deal. I started to get irritated though, and this is why I loathe cooking chicken quarters, when I saw the vein. As soon as you cut into it there was blood running everywhere. I prefer to bake chicken quarters because this doesn't happen. At that point, this had taken longer than I had hoped to cook, and I still had two more chickens to make, so I stick the freaking thing in the microwave just to cook it the rest of the way. Note: I did not use this chicken to base my taste on. 

This tasted like chicken. Nothing special at all. I'm not sure what I was expecting because when I realized it tasted like regular, nothing special freaking chicken, my irritation soared. I spent all that time and got grease popped on me for regular tasting chicken. I couldn't even taste the rub and I think it stuck mostly to the bottom of the pan. Save yourself the trouble and just bake the freaking chicken. 

Update: Check out the Charred Broccoli and Cauliflower Mash post for positive feedback on this chicken. 

Look at how big that freakin chicken is.