Greek Lemon Olive Chicken

Well, it's Greek to me.

Passover is coming up, and my mother insisted I take on more cooking than I'm already doing and serve my guests a chicken dish. Because apparently brisket, kugel, chopped liver and asparagus isn't nearly enough. Actually, now that I type that out, it doesn't seem like enough. Lucky for me, chicken drumsticks are like $10 for a million at Costco. And while everyone is buying a ham for Easter, the chicken drumsticks are pretty much neglected. That or there was a bird flu virus I was not made aware of. It's entirely possible, since I'm the most uninformed person on current events, like, ever.

Start with an incredibly generous amount of olive oil, butter, and chopped garlic in a deep pan. You don't want to make this low fat or anything, because that would just be practical.

The spice mix on the right is probably my favorite seasoning ever. It goes well on lamb, beef, chicken, fish, popcorn, whatever. Buy it for chicken on Passover, use it again the next day to make lamb on Easter. Also grab some sweet paprika and some lemon pepper seasoning.

Now it's time to season the crap out of some chicken. Really, you have it all. You have some sweet from the paprika, sour from the lemon, spice from the pepper, and salt from the Cavender's. Go nuts, don't worry about it being even. As you can tell, I sure didn't. I used drumsticks here, but you can use whatever cut of chicken you want, even an entire chicken. I imagine this recipe might work well with salmon too, but the execution would be different.

Add the chicken to the pan and get it nice and brown, until you can't see the pink from the outside. The inside won't be cooked, but we'll take care of that in a bit. Once it's browned as you like it, squeeze one whole lemon over everything.

I had these yummy mixed pitted Kalamata olives I got from an olive bar at the grocery store sitting in my fridge. I can't resist the olive bar. Anyway, I dumped them over the chicken with lemon and covered the pot and stuck it in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Serve with rice pilaf, and spoon a bunch of the juice over the chicken and rice.