by Kate Gowers

Created on: March 14, 2008

Roast chicken with stuffing and all the trimmings is still too time consuming and filling for a weekday (in my opinion, anyway). Much easier, and very tasty, is chicken with roasted vegetables - a sort of Mediterranean medley.

I am American, though I've lived in the UK for nearly 20 years. Therefore, for 20 years, I've missed out on Thanksgiving, which occurs, inconveniently, on a Thursday. Now, Thanksgiving dinner is a tradition, and thanksgiving dinner is too. Traditionally, this means a stuffyourface-fest of turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Of course, I live in the UK. This means that I had to work, it being Thursday, my teenage daughter was in school, and my husband was home awaiting a delivery of a bed (a delivery which, I might add, was a complete and utter disaster - some company - well, ok, Raft Furniture - managed to deliver just the headboard. In the meantime, we'd junked the old bed, mattress and the like - I am NOT happy. ANYWAY...). Plus, I don't like sweet potatoes. Or pumpkin pie. And a turkey is a bit much for just three people. Good, fresh turkey is difficult to get in the UK in November. So instead, we decided to roast a chicken as a kind of Thanksgiving-lite.

As with many of my recipes, this started life in a cookbook (a one pot cooking cookbook - my favourite kind), but has been adapted by me over time to suit our lifestyle and tastes. I hope you'll take this and make it your own too.

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Ingredients
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1 Chicken (rather important, this one) -
Weight, of course, dependant on how many you want to feed - the one we had last night was around one and a half kilos (just over three pounds) and we have plenty of leftovers.

Olive oil - quite a lot of it.
The original recipe gives a quantity in ml (and it's 150ml or more), but I just pour and look.

1/2 a lemon

A bunch of sprigs of fresh thyme

Small new potatoes - for the three of us, we used around 10 - larger ones I cut in half.

1 large red or yellow pepper (or green if you prefer) cut into chunks.

1 fennel bulb cut into quarters or thereabouts
We couldn't get fennel last night, so used red onion cut into chunks. Both work but give a very different flavour - fennel has a slightly aniseedy flavour. I like it, (though I don't usually like aniseed), but my daughter doesn't.

2 courgettes, cut into one inch cubes.
The original recipe calls for one large aubergine, but I don't like aubergine, so use courgettes instead. But if you

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