Roast Chicken with Spring Vegetables Is a Whole Meal in One Dish
All photos by Farideh Sadeghin.

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Food

Roast Chicken with Spring Vegetables Is a Whole Meal in One Dish

The secret to perfectly crisp skin is to sear it on the stove first.

Welcome to Health Goth, our column dedicated to cooking vegetables in ways that even our most cheeseburger-loving, juice-bar-loathing readers would approve of. Not everyone realizes this, but vegetables actually do taste good. We invite chefs to prove this assertion—and they do, time and time again.

It wasn’t quite spring yet when chef Mary Dumont paid us a visit at the MUNCHIES Test Kitchen, but she did her best to bring the early signs of the season with her. As the chef and co-owner of Cultivar in Boston, her menu philosophy is usually more strictly “hyper-seasonal.” (It helps that they have their own gardens, conventional and hydroponic, to help them with this.) But for her visit, we leaned into the perennial availability of produce from Whole Foods. It was early March in New York. We did our best.

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As she began setting up her mise en place for her dish, we started having a Pavlovian response to the sight of bright pink radishes, crisp snap peas, feathery fennel bulbs, and a mélange of herbs. It might have been gray and threatening to snow yet again outside, but in the kitchen, we had visions of warm May days such as the ones we're luxuriating in now, and of perusing the farmer’s market and finding something other than winter squash for the first time in months.

Chef Mary Dumont, of Cultivar in Boston, picking herbs in the MUNCHIES Test Kitchen.

“If we wish hard enough, maybe it will turn into spring soon,” she says. In the mean time, while we’re waiting for Mother Nature to catch the hell up, Dumont is preparing a whole roast chicken with a bevy of beautiful grilled spring vegetables as a form of truly delicious wishful thinking.

She starts by patting a small chicken (a spring chicken, if you will) dry with paper towels, then salting the heck out of it, both inside and out. She cracks some pepper over the breast, tucks the wings behind the neck, and ties the legs together. “Don’t go crazy with brining, trussing the whole thing up. This is fine,” she says.

Before searing the skin briefly in a hot oven-safe skillet, she rubs the bird with minced thyme and thinly sliced garlic, and throws a little extra of both of those inside the cavity for good measure.

When the skin begins to brown, she pops the bird in the oven and gets started on her vegetables.

Just a bit of a sear on the chicken skin before putting it into the oven to roast.

She trims the tops off of a bunch of radishes and two fennel bulbs, then quarters them, and trims a handful of snap peas of their woody tips, and drizzles everything with olive oil, salt and pepper.

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On a hot grill pan, she arranges all of the vegetables in an even layer so everything can get nice char marks. “Don’t fuss with these too much, don’t turn them a million times,” she advises. When the fennel begins to caramelize, and the snap peas begin to blister, and the radishes start to char, everything will be ready to pull off.

With the chicken still roasting away, Dumont prepares one last garnish—a bright, flavorful dressing—that she’ll drizzle over the whole lot of this when all is said and done. She minces garlic, lots of mint and thyme, and a large shallot, then tosses it all with a hefty dose of lemon juice, olive oil, and salt and pepper.

When the chicken is perfectly browned and reaches the right internal temperature, it’s ready to go. Dumont pulls it out of the oven, and arranges it on a platter with the grilled veggies, and drizzles her dressing over top of everything.

Because that alone doesn’t look enough like the manifestation of spring abundance for her, she shaves more bright red radishes over top like parmesan cheese on pasta, and scatters feathery fronds of fennel. The result is an undeniably springy version of the most festive holiday roast platter you’ve ever seen.

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When we carve the chicken, it’s perfectly juicy and tender, and the acid and soft herbs from the dressing provide a bright counterpoint to the salty, crispy skin. It’s the kind of roast chicken that’s worth turning your oven on for, now that the temperatures have regularly hit over 65. Finally, the wait for spring is over.