Greek Chicken and Potato Traybake, excerpted from Milk Street: Tuesday Nights Mediterranean. Photography by Connie Miller.
Mediterranean cooking is so much more than olive oil, grilled fish, and just-harvested vegetables. It is a diverse cuisine that encompasses the cultures and traditions of Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The food is direct, simple, and honest. It is proud to be served without disguise or embellishment.
Every Tuesday Nights recipe delivers big flavour, but the cooking is quick and easy. Each of these 125 Mediterranean dinners is ready in under 45 minutes, and many take just 20 minutes start to finish. Dishes include:
- Green Shakshuka
- Spicy Egyptian Eggplant with Chickpeas and Herbs
- Bulgur Salad with Summer Vegetables and Pomegranate Molasses
- Harissa-Spiced Pasta and Chicken with Green Beans
- Greek Spanakorizo with Shrimp
- Spanish Ribeye with Green Olives and White Wine.
The recipes are organized by how you cook, with some chapters focused on time—Fast (45 minutes), Faster (35 minutes), and Fastest (under 25 minutes)—while others dive into themes such as Hearty Vegetable Mains, Supper Soups, and Flat and Folded—including pizza, flatbreads, pita sandwiches, and panini. Many of the recipes require only one piece of cookware, and they all are built from pantry staples. Dinner? Solved—every night of the week.
Greek Chicken and Potato Traybake
Start to finish 45 minutes Servings 4
1 teaspoon dried oregano
¼ to ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
Kosher salt and ground black pepper
Four 12-ounce bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts or 3 pounds bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, trimmed and patted dry
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1½ pounds medium Yukon Gold potatoes, unpeeled, cut into
1-inch-thick wedges
2 lemons, halved crosswise
8 medium garlic cloves, peeled
½ cup pitted Kalamata olives, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons drained capers
3 tablespoons roughly chopped fresh dill, divided
The Greek dish known as kotopoulo skorthato typically is called “Greek garlic-lemon chicken” in English, but the ensemble also includes potatoes, making it a delicious complete meal. For our take on the classic, we use our trusty traybake technique—we roast the ingredients on a rimmed baking sheet in a hot oven to ensure the quickest cooking possible and to develop nice caramelization.
At the end, we also toss in black olives, dill and capers to ratchet up the flavours. If using chicken breasts, purchase pieces that are close in size so they cook at the same rate.
Don’t use extra-large bone-in chicken breasts if you can help it; 12-ounce pieces work best. If unavoidable, keep in mind that bone-in breasts weighing about 1 pound each require 40 to 50 minutes of roasting.
Heat the oven to 475°F with a rack in the middle position. In a large bowl, stir together the oregano, pepper flakes, 2 teaspoons salt and ½ teaspoon black pepper. Sprinkle 2 teaspoons of the mix onto all sides of the chicken. To the remaining seasoning mix in the bowl, add the oil, potatoes, lemon halves and garlic, then toss to coat.
Place the garlic in the center of a rimmed baking sheet, then arrange the chicken, skin side up, around the garlic; this placement helps prevent the garlic from scorching during roasting. Arrange the lemons, cut sides up, and the potatoes in an even layer around the chicken. Roast until the thickest part of the breasts (if using) reaches 160°F and the thickest part of the thighs (if using) reaches 175°F, about 30 minutes.
Using tongs, transfer the chicken and lemon halves to a serving platter. Push the potatoes to the edge of the baking sheet, leaving the garlic in the center. Using a fork, mash the garlic to a rough paste. Add the olives, capers and
2 tablespoons of the dill to the baking sheet, then, using a wide metal spatula, stir and toss the ingredients, scraping up any browned bits.
Transfer the potato mixture to the platter, placing it around the chicken. Sprinkle with the remaining 1 tablespoon dill.
Excerpted from MILK STREET: TUESDAY NIGHTS MEDITERRANEAN. Copyright © 2021 by CPK Media, LLC. Photographs by Connie Miller. Used with permission of Voracious, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.