It’s humbling that way every September, without fail, knocks me on my rump. One week, you’re breezy and unscheduled, reading books on a beach and tearing lobster apart with your bare hands (indeed, we were in Maine) and the next you’re realizing a certain fetid backpack was never emptied on the last day of school in June, scrambling for after-school care, and despite the fact that I work every week of the year, somehow there’s a lot more to do. If dinner can’t be made in one pan in which everything cooks at once, I haven’t been making it. And yet I’ve made this chicken dish four times in the last month; it’s clearly time to shout about it across the internet.

I trace this back to a newsletter from Clare de Boer last April (and if you don’t subscribe, you should; it’s wonderful), in which she was on a mission to find a sheet pan chicken recipe that actually had crispy skin, and found it in a pan of chicken thighs with lemon and onion. I, too, am a crispy chicken skin skeptic; it’s not that I don’t believe it gets crisp, but I find it rarely stays that way once it has rested or when other ingredients join the party. But, curiosity got the better of me — curiosity, but not, uh, any kind of adherence to the recipe as written because see above: I need everything to be a meal-in-one-pan right now. I added potatoes (because potatoes with chicken and lemon are excellent) and chickpeas (I’m honestly less clear on why, but it felt right) to a baking dish (not sheet pan) and despite all of my changes, was still entirely delighted with the outcome.
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