Easy One Pan Chicken, Potatoes & Homemade Coleslaw

This is a one tray wonder. It is so easy and by doing it yourself at home, you know you're gonna save at least half the money than going out and getting it right. It's gonna be a glorious feast of colour, gentle wonderful spice and I think this could be a classic in your home like it is in mine. So let's do it. People think that chilli is always about heat. Wrong, wrong. Because often it's about controlling the heat and finding other flavours in chillies. So what I've got in this dish is I have fresh chillies. Easy to get hold of. Smoked, dried paprika and then harissa. This is like a ground, dried chilli in oil. So that's gonna give you layers of juicy, sumptuous spiciness. We're gonna go in with two tablespoons of harissa. If you've never bought it, please try it. It's got a really juicy, fruity, round kind of chilli flavour. It's not attacking. And then a couple of tablespoons of lovely olive oil, right. Then season it up with salt and pepper and then a good couple of tablespoons of red or white wine vinegar. Look at that. So you know that's gonna kick with flavour. Into that, we're gonna go in with a whole bulb of garlic. Now this isn't gonna be too strong because when you cook whole garlic cloves like this, it goes mild and sweet and you get wonderful perfume. Then I'll go in with 10 fresh chillies. The standard chillies you get in a supermarket. Often they're the red ones or the green ones, sometimes the yellow ones, but they're all gonna go in the tray. By roasting them whole, it's a very, very gentle heat. It's just complex and interesting and exciting. So take a knife and just prick each one of those chillies and that will just, a, stop them from exploding, which is always exciting, and also just let a little bit of spice out. So this is now the marinade for this chicken. I'm gonna do a simple piece of butchery that everyone can do. Very gently, don't put too much weight down. Cut down the back of the chicken. It's very, very simple. Open that out like a book, like that, and then we'll go on top of the chicken and just press it down. It makes it cook more evenly. So we put this in here and get that vinegar and that oil and the garlic and just have a proper little rub up. Now if you want to wear rubber gloves, go for it, and then use all the garlic and chillies to rub that marinade all over the chicken. Oh, I forgot one thing. Two onions. Don't forget the onions. Now the onions, you can go white or red or both if you want, but this is going to give the sauce the sweetness and the silkiness that we definitely want. Get the onions in there. Beautiful. Here's the little trick. This is when things get even more exciting. Simply I'm going to get a rack like this and I'm going to do that. Now what's brilliant about cooking it directly on the bars is you get 360 degree roasting, right? The crispiest skin and the juiciest meat, but most importantly is it rains down all of its juices on whatever is below. So to start with, it'll be the garlic and the chillies. That's going to make the most amazing chilli sauce you've ever had, right? And then I'm going to put the potatoes underneath it and it's going to carry on raining. I'm putting it in my wood oven here, 180 degrees Celsius, which is 350 Fahrenheit for an hour. After half an hour, the chillies and the garlic will come out and I'll make the most amazing sauce, but until then, time for a big clean down. So the chicken's cooking beautifully. I can hear it. I can smell it. It's so, so good. Now potato. I normally cut them into wedges, easy peasy, but this time I am going to show you one of the weapons of being a dad with kids, the crinkle cutter. I know it kind of probably seems a little bit daft, but all the work I did in schools, one thing I did learn was if you put a whole fruit out, half the kids won't take it. If you cut it up, you know, crinkle cutter, little fruit cutter, they all eat it, right? So that is the spirit for me. Make food fun, make it exciting. So spuds are done. Let's get the chicken out. It's had half an hour, so it's already roasting up a treat. Come on, look at that. Just beautiful. So see all the fat rendering here and crisping up that skin. Look at the flavour, right? That's dripping down on our amazing chillies and onions and garlic. Take a plate and remove all these beautiful whole ingredients. These will now become one of the best chilli sauces I think you might ever try. So out with the onions, garlic and chilli, and now in with our crinkle cut potatoes. Sometimes I put a little cheeky bit of vinegar in just to help the sticky bits come off the bottom, and then they start to kind of dress the potatoes. And by the way, if you wanted to put parsnips in here, carrots in here, you know, nice root veg, they taste incredible. Right, now for the third expression of chilli, the smoked dried paprika. Happy days. So a little teaspoon, seasoned on top like that. So the chicken goes back on top to carry on cooking. That'll go in the oven for another half an hour, so that's an hour in total, and then when the chicken is roasting, that's when we'll get a little bit of colour on those potatoes. Now for one of the most amazing chilli sauces. For this I'm using a blender, you could use a pestle and mortar, no worries. So the onions can go straight in because they're soft and marmalady and gorgeous. That'll give you kind of the sweetness and the texture that we want. Then when it comes to the garlic, squeeze those incredible little cloves that are now soft, out of the skin and in there like that. That garlic, even though it's a whole bulb, is mild and fragrant and sweet now. Now with the chillies, if it's just all about heat, you can't taste nothing. So take the stalk off, split it open and just take the seeds out like that. Then what you've done is minimised heat and maximised flavour. This is going to give you the most incredible, rounded, balanced chilli flavour, straight in the liquidiser. So let's get rid of all these seeds, that's the hot stuff. Have a little clean down and make sure you wash your hands, otherwise you could get caught out. To make this into a beautiful sauce, we fragrance mint. Mint and chilli are literally like best mates, right? Since birth, right? It's such a good combo. Then a swig, about a tablespoon, of vinegar because you want that tang and a nice pinch of salt, right? We'll whiz this up with a little splash of water, enough to kind of make it a nice saucy texture and then just whiz it up in the greenhouse as you do. Here we go. Right, you've got to test it for salt and vinegar, just to kiss more. You need the tang, you need the seasoning. It's got loads of fruit. It's hot but not in a kind of aggressive way, it's sort of gentle. It's like chilli but in kind of like silk sheets. So the chilli sauce, just put that into a nice bowl. Look at that and what's really cool about this recipe is if you only made that with green chillies, then that will be green. If you went yellow, it'd be yellow. If it'd be red, it'd be red and of course this is a bit of everything, so yes. To contrast all of that, I'm going to do an amazing one minute slaw. Anything crunchy, apple, onion, fennel, carrot, cabbage of any description, cucumber, anything crunchy you've got in your fridge. Have a little mind sweep and then we'll take those kind of clanky old frumpy things and we'll make it into like a thing of beauty. So grate the apple, core and all, straight through there. Easy. As soon as you've done that, we'll go on to like your white cabbage. Long strokes and then you get really nice texture and then you can kind of mix it up with some red cabbage if you want to, onion, cucumber, always a winner. Long strokes, fresh. Then if you've got things like fennel, really nice. So you take your everyday standard coleslaw, start making it a little bit posh. Carrots of course is standard but the kids absolutely love it. Maybe something you haven't done before is sweet corn and those lovely little capsules of the corn are just so sweet. So this nutrition and this freshness in contrast with the crispy skin and that gentle heat and then the chilli sauce. Win, win, win. Look at that, posh. All I'm gonna do now is dress this with some nice yoghurt, whole grain mustard, a heaped teaspoon, hand action and then just give it a nice little dress up. Now to give it tang, lemon juice. So this is what I'm doing when I'm trying to come up with recipes, like just have contrast and freshness but look at that, a beautiful messy plate of beautifulness. Bit of olive oil just to kind of say I love you. Rainbow slaw in seconds. Wow. This chicken has had an hour, it's got nice colour on it. So as per normal with any roasting joint, you know, you let it rest, right? Give it a couple of minutes and by opening that chicken out, what you do is get perfectly cooked wings, breasts and the lovely juicy thigh and drumstick there. Look the actual bone comes out, amazing. Right, spuds. Look at that. Beautiful, sizzling away, properly gnarly and crispy and really nice with the skin left on them. Joyful. So we've got a lovely bit of thigh there, got a nice little drumstick, then we got half of that little wing. Just gorgeous. Let's get some of those spuds and then our friend, Mr chilli sauce. Come on, yes. Bit of slaw. So there you go, that is a beautiful plate of goodness. Little squeeze of lemon maybe. Right, bit of spud, bit of chicken, chilli sauce. There you go, that is what you call a little mouthful of joy. You have to make that. That has got so many layers of flavour. A chilli sauce to die for. It's not hot, it's got layers and layers of flavour and it's a one tray wonder. What are you waiting for? Go on. Kids, lunch!