Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Lebanese Roast Chicken with Chickpeas, Hazelnuts, & Sumac Over Rice with Yogurt

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Lebanese Roast Chicken with Chickpeas, Hazelnuts, & Sumac
Over Rice with Yogurt
Serves: 4
Difficulty: Easy
I love this exotic mix of Lebanese spices and flavors with some Turkish and Israeli influences.  Lebanese cuisine includes copious amounts of garlic, olive oil and lemon.  Poultry is eaten more often than red meat. Frequently used in Turkish cuisine are lentils and nuts…in this case featuring chickpeas and hazelnuts.
 
Hazelnuts, raisens and currants for the recipe
Who doesn’t love roast chicken? You could make this dish with a whole chicken or with whole chicken legs as I have described here. I love the crackly, crisp salty skin and moist tender meat. But, most of the time, I don’t like roast chicken because most of the time, well, you end up with dry breast meat in order to cook the leg meat adequately. It also makes a mess of my oven. Lately if desiring a whole roasted or grilled chicken, I have been butterflying the chicken in order to achieve the 150-degree F for the breast simultaneously with the 170-degree legs. It is relatively simple to butterfly the chicken by cutting out the spine and flattening the carcass. I promise to share pictures of how to do this in the near future, but today, we use whole chicken legs.