By Tom Cleary
Food Columnist, ‘11

Welcome back everyone to a new year of Cooking with Tom!  As a welcome back recipe, I’ve got a roast chicken potato dish with a red wine sauce.  This may sound like a fancy thing that is difficult to make, but it is actually very simple.  All it takes is one deep pan and about two hours for prep and cooking time.  Don’t let the two hours scare you either, most of that is just sitting back, relaxing and letting the smells of your cooking skills caress your nostrils.

Ingredients:
1 whole chicken
5 medium sized potatoes
2  onions
1 bunch of garlic
Salt, pepper and other herbs and spices.
½ cup of red wine

The Chicken
- Preheat oven to 350 degree.
- Peel and cut the potatoes lengthwise about ½ inch thick and lay them on the bottom of a deep pan.
- Then chop up one of the onions into large pieces and mix them with the potatoes.
- Season the potatoes and onions liberally with whatever suits your tastes.
- Next clean the chicken and season the inside cavity and then add in the other onion (having been cut in half) and with the peeled garlic into the chicken too.
- Place the stuffed chicken on top of the potato layer and wrap the bird loosely with tin foil and put it in the oven.
-After an hour, remove the tinfoil and let the dish cook for another half hour to get the skin golden and crispy.

For the Sauce
- Put the chicken and potatoes on two different plates and let the chicken rest for 10 min.  After resting grain all the extra juices back into the pan and add the half cup of red wine
-Now put the pan over a hot burner and reduce the sauce until it turns to a gravy color, while making sure to scrap up all of the bits stuck to the bottom of the dish.  Not only does this give you a good sauce, but it makes it easier to clean the pan afterwards.