Ranch Chicken with Carrots and Potatoes

Ranch Chicken with Carrots and Potatoes is an easy weeknight meal you can prepare in 10 minutes.  A slightly sweet variation on baked chicken that everyone will love.

A 10 Minute Tuesday Dish

Natalie is home for the summer and she is going to help me with my blog. Her first suggestion, which I love, is to come up with more recipes that she could make that would only take 10 minutes to prepare, not including cooking time.  She came up with a catchy phrase, “10 minute Tuesdays”.  We will be posting every Tuesday throughout the summer with dinner recipes that a busy novice cook can put together easily with just the basic cooking utensils. These will not be mediocre recipes, but recipes that we love and would serve to guests. Regardless of your cooking skills, we all have busy nights when we don’t want to spend time in the kitchen.  We hope to create a place where you can find some new things to try for those busy nights. Please send us any suggestions and comments.

So for our first post, we made a chicken dish that includes vegetables all in one pan. We set all the ingredients on the counter and then started the stopwatch, 8 minutes and that included scrubbing the carrots and potatoes.  But as I said, quick is only one requirement, dinner has to be awesome too.  This recipe is so easy to put together but has a great flavor and is not your everyday oven roasted chicken.  Sprinkling a small amount of brown sugar on the chicken pieces and then adding the powdered ranch dressing, gives it just a slightly sweet and savory flavor.  The carrots and potatoes take on the sweet ranch flavor and were so good that Natalie even ate a cooked carrot!

I realize that not everyone likes chicken thighs so we had a mixture of chicken breasts and thighs.  The breasts did not have skin on them so I took them out a little earlier than the thighs and covered them in foil while the thighs cooked.  All the taste testers loved this dish and Taylor said she would definitely be making this in the fall when she will be in her first apartment.  Another benefit to this recipe is that you can prep it in advance.  I wasn’t sure when everyone was going to be home for dinner, so in 8 minutes, I put it together and just put the pan in the refrigerator until everyone got home.   If you are in a time crunch you could do this in the morning, cover it and just take it out when you are ready to bake it.

Damn Delicious

Ranch Chicken with Carrots and Potatoes

Ranch Chicken with Carrots and Potatoes is an easy weeknight meal you can prepare in 10 minutes.  A slightly sweet variation on baked chicken that everyone will love. 

• Author: Barbara Curry
• Prep Time: 10 minutes
• Cook Time: 30 minutes
• Total Time: 40 minutes
• Yield: 6-8 1x
• Category: Dinner

Scale 1x2x3x

Ingredients

• 8 teaspoons brown sugar
• 8 chicken thighs with bone and skin
• 1 lb baby red potatoes
• 1 lb baby carrots
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 package ranch seasoning and salad dressing mix
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• salt and pepper

Instructions

1.Preheat oven to 400º. Spray a rimmed baking sheet with non-stick spray.

2.Pat chicken dry and salt and pepper. Rub about 1 teaspoon of brown sugar on both side of each piece of chicken, working it under the skin. (You can use chicken breasts or thighs without skin, but skin will make it more moist) Place on rimmed baking sheet.

3.Scrub carrots and potatoes. Cut potatoes into quarters and place on jelly roll pan along with carrots in a single layer.

4.Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with ranch dressing and minced garlic. Season with salt and pepper.

5.Place in oven and cook until internal temperature is about 160º, about 30 minutes.

6.If you want to use breasts and thighs, you may need to remove the breasts earlier and cover with foil while the thicker pieces cook.