Birthday love

We celebrated my mother in law's birthday last night with a DELICIOUS dinner followed by equally delicious pie pockets (courtesy of Martha; find the super easy recipe here. I used premade pie crust and that made it even easier. My hearts were a slightly more rustic than Ms. Stewart's, but I'm positive just as tasty.)

Sadly, I didn't get a picture of the dinner we had which was one of the best chicken meals I've ever made. Along with from scratch baking, meat dishes tend to frighten me when it comes to experimenting. Luckily, I went against my better judgement and tried playing around with flavors anyway. Here's what I did; enjoy the recipe:

Preheat oven to 425 Rub olive oil on chicken (I used a package of chicken breasts. Next time I think I'll do this with a whole chicken). Salt and pepper. Place chicken on the bottom of a roasting pan (or in my case since I don't have a fancy roasting pan, a metal baking/casserole pan). Sprinkle a pinch of dried thyme over chicken. (You could use fresh too; I just had none on hand.) In a seperate bowl toss 4 heartily diced red potatoes, a whole bag of frozen green beans, 2-3 diced shallots. Sprinkle more olive oil, salt and pepper and thyme on veggies until they are evenly coated; not too heavy. Place veggies in pan completely covering chicken (or if using a whole chicken, spread evenly around.) Place clusters of red grapes on top of veggies generously throughout the pan. Cover loosely with foil and cook for about 45 minutes. Take foil off and cook for another 30ish minutes (every so often shift veggies around in the pan as they tend to roast quicker than the chicken can cook). Once chicken is cooked through take out of oven, let rest for a few minutes and enjoy.