Baked Chicken Leg on a Bed of Vegetables

I don’t eat chicken much (especially when I dine out) because I once read somewhere some chickens are actually injected with hormones to speed up their growth. And when I buy raw chicken, I like to buy them from Sakura.

Sakura chickens are not given any hormones and are also given enough leg room to roam around. Most of the times, I usually see NTUC selling the whole chicken but I was at NTUC Xtra the other day and I saw them selling the different parts of the Sakura chicken! That was great because I don’t like buying the whole chicken as it is harder to cook and harder to clean.

I bought the chicken leg and it costs me about $3 plus if I remember correctly. I also noticed that the Sakura chicken leg had much lesser blood clots as compared to a regular chicken while I was cleaning it. I decided to bake it because it’s easy and nothing will probably go wrong with baked chicken!

I used:

1 chicken leg

1 large green capsicum

1 carrot

cheddar cheese

I watched one of the Jamie Oliver shows some time ago and he was baking a whole chicken. Besides doing the usual marinate for the chicken, he also stuffed slices of cheese beneath the skin. There is actually a pocket of space between the skin and the meat. I thought it was a brilliant idea when I watched the show and it came to me when I did my baked chicken. 

   

  

So there it was, looking all nice and well-settled on the bed of green and orange. Check out the cubes of cheese beneath the skin. I scored the chicken first and stuffed them in. I also added some rosemary but you can skip that if you don’t have it. Those brown crumbs are cracklings from a 2nd batch of rendered lard. I added them for the extra oomph.

- Preheat the oven to 150°C

 

- Wrap a tin foil over the tray of vegetables and chicken like this so that the heat within the “package” will slowly cook the chicken while sealing in the juices and moisture

  
- Pop it into the oven and bake at 150°C for 30 mins

- For the last 10 mins, I removed the tin foil and switched from both elements in the oven to only the top element to give a nice crispy texture to the skin

 

 

Wah, looks delectable. Look at the pool of juice from the chicken on the plate – the product of the chicken essence with the sweetness of the carrots and capsicum, YUM! The chicken was tender and very tasty and the cheese made it exceptional.