Roast Lemon and Thyme Chicken with Squash and Zucchini

Tonight I really wanted to try a roast chicken recipe out of a new Jamie Oliver cookbook, which I recently received as a gift.  I don't know much about Jamie Oliver, other than that he's British and recently tried to teach some mining town to eat food without corn syrup or something along those lines.  Anyway, I didn't really check the cooking time when I chose to make the recipe this week, and I was somewhat surprised that the roasting time was an hour and 20 minutes.  Having walked in the door to the apartment at about 8:30, this prep was out of the question.

I took apart the chicken, something I've gotten pretty decent at doing, and tossed the back and wing tips into the freezer to make stock.  As Alton Brown would say, "but that's another show."  I then started looking for lemon and thyme chicken recipes online (if you do this in the opposite order it saves you a hand washing).  My instinct was to just make a thyme and oregano butter and put it under the skin and roast away.  I probably should have done this, but I figured that if I just found a recipe I could post the link and I'd have to write less.

Two paragraphs later, this is obviously not shaping up as I had planned.  Here is the recipe I used, let's call it Roast Chicken with Lemon and Thyme.  I threw in some extra garlic and some oregano from what I believe was the first week's share, and just used an entire chicken worth of parts instead of just dark meat.  To try to keep the cooking times around the same, I took apart the thighs from the legs, but left the wings on the breasts (white meat cooks faster than dark).  This actually worked well.

During the last 5 minutes of cooking, I threw some 1/3 inch slices of farm share squash and zucchini tossed with olive oil, salt, and pepper spread out on a baking sheet.  The high heat didn't turn the thicker pieces soggy, but I had to be careful to get them out after only 5-6 minutes.  I served it with some boxed pearl basil and herb couscous, which was overly salty (like most packaged everything).

This turned out decently... The chicken was kind of oily.  I should have finished it under the broiler to brown it a little more, and it probably could have benefited from being drained on paper towel or patted off.  The flavor was pretty mild, but it was good chicken so I think this was OK.  I'm not going to rush to make this again, although it was a pretty good use of farm share thyme and oregano, and the zucchini and squash turned out really well.  I'm hoping we get more pattypan squash soon!