Excerpted from Katie Workman’s The Mom 100 Cookbook. 

In New York City’s East Harlem there is an Italian restaurant called Rao’s. It’s known for its Neapolitan cuisine, but it is notorious for the fact that it is completely impossible to get a reservation there. The tables are “owned” by regulars (there has been a lot of speculation about what it takes to be a regular—think The Sopranos), and unless one of them lends his table to you for a night, you will probably not be eating there in this lifetime. You may also recognize the name Rao’s from the label of some pretty pricey pasta sauces available in many supermarkets and wherever pretty pricey pasta sauces are sold.

I actually did get behind the velvet ropes one time, with friends who knew someone. The two things I remember the most are that (1) I announced that I was pregnant with my first child (although the combination of adult acne and the fact that I was drinking a Shirley Temple had probably tipped everyone off) and (2) the Lemon Chicken, one of Rao’s most famous dishes, was amazing.

Over the years I’ve worked up a modified version of this lemon chicken, and it’s a great take on simple broiled chicken. The lemon sauce is wonderful, and there is lots of it. Serve this with rice, crusty bread, and/or Mashed Potatoes.

Lemon Chicken

Serves 8 to 10

Ingredients

• 1 cup fresh lemon juice (from 4 to 6 lemons)
• 2/3 cup olive oil
• 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
• 2 teaspoons finely minced garlic
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano or thyme Kosher or coarse salt
• ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 4 bone-in chicken breast halves with skin (2 to 2½ pounds total)
• 6 bone-in chicken thighs with skin (2½ to 3 pounds total)
• ¼ cup Italian (flat-leaf) parsley (optional, see Note).

Instructions

1. Preheat the broiler with the rack placed about 8 inches away from the heat source.
2. Put the lemon juice, olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, oregano or thyme, ½ teaspoon of salt, and ¼ teaspoon of pepper in a container with a lid and shake well to blend.
3. Place the chicken pieces skin side down on a rimmed baking sheet and salt them lightly. Broil for 15 minutes. Turn the pieces, lightly salt them, and broil them until the skin is crisp and golden brown and the juices run clear when the pieces are pierced with a fork, 15 to 20 minutes longer.
4. Remove the chicken from the broiler, leaving the broiler on. Cut the breasts and thighs in half (you can use a clean dish towel to hold the chicken steady so you don’t burn yourself; cut across the bone if you have a very strong sharp knife or cut just alongside the bone if a crosswise cut is too difficult). Pour off all but 1 tablespoon of fat, and return the chicken to the baking sheet.
5. Shake the lemon sauce again and pour it over the chicken. Turn the pieces over so they are evenly coated with the sauce, making sure all of the pieces end up skin side down.
6. Broil the chicken until it has browned a bit more, another 2 minutes, then turn the pieces skin side up and broil them until the skin is browned a bit more, about 3 minutes longer. Remove the chicken from the baking sheet and, if you are using the parsley, stir it into the sauce still in the baking sheet. Pour the sauce over the chicken and serve.

Note: The parsley is optional only because if you happen to have one of those kids who runs screaming from the table if anything has a fleck of green in it, you will not want to inflict the horrors of parsley upon your little prince or princess.

Cooking Tip: Don’t be nervous about broiling. You will certainly want to keep an eye on the chicken to make sure it doesn’t burn. But once you’ve cooked whole pieces under a broiler and see how juicy they come out, and how quickly the cooking goes, you’ll become attached to this form of high heat cooking (think grilling). Feel free to use a different mixture of chicken pieces.

Make Ahead: You can broil the chicken and make the sauce a day ahead. Refrigerate the sauce and chicken separately, or toss the chicken with the sauce and refrigerate them together for an even deeper lemony flavor. Let the chicken come to room temperature about twenty minutes before broiling it with the sauce. This last five minute broil won’t heat the chicken all the way through, just warm it up on the outside. Leftovers are also fantastic cold or at room temperature.

What the Kids Can Do: Let the kids juice the lemons, combine the ingredients for the sauce, shake it up, and pour over the chicken.

About the Book:

Introducing the lifesaving cookbook for every mother with kids at home—the book that solves the 20 most common cooking dilemmas. What’s your predicament: breakfast on a harried school morning? The Mom 100’s got it—Personalized Pizzas are not only fast but are nutritious, and hey, it doesn’t get any better than pizza for breakfast. Kids making noise about the same old lunch? The Mom 100’s got it—three different Turkey Wraps, plus a Wrap Blueprint delivers enough variety to last for years.

Katie Workman, founding editor in chief of Cookstr.com and mother of two school-age kids, offers recipes, tips, techniques, attitude, and wisdom for staying happy in the kitchen while proudly keeping it homemade—because homemade not only tastes best, but is also better (and most economical) for you. The Mom 100 is 20 dilemmas every mom faces, with 5 solutions for each: including terrific recipes for the vegetable-averse, the salad-rejector, for the fish-o-phobe, or the overnight vegetarian convert. “Fork-in-the-Road” variations make it easy to adjust a recipe to appeal to different eaters (i.e., the kids who want bland and the adults who don’t). “What the Kids Can Do” sidebars suggest ways for kids to help make each dish.

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