I’ve seen butterflied chickens for sale at the market, but never bought one. I love stuffing so if we have a whole chicken, it usually gets stuffed. I’ve recently had my knife sharpened, so I decided that I’d butterfly a chicken myself.

Butterfly is such a lovely word. To be butterflied, is not so lovely. Hopefully you will find this recipe lovely.

One of the benefits of butterflying a chicken is that you can marinade both sides. Inside and out! Ideally, you would marinade this for a few hours but I wanted to eat asap so this recipe should take less than 1 hour from start to finish. Change it up if you have time to marinade.

Use whatever root vegetables you like. This time, I used red skinned potatoes, red onion and parsnip.

A Recipe for a Demented Butterfly

Ingredients
1 smallish chicken
An assortment of root vegetables and a few cloves of garlic
A fresh salad

Marinade
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped
Zest of 2 lemons
Juice of 2 lemons
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons chili seasoning
2 tablespoons oil
Salt
Black pepper

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 200°C.
2. Mix all the marinade ingredients together in a bowl.
3. Peel and cut the root vegetables to your liking.
4. Cut the base off the garlic cloves. Leave unpeeled.
5. Add garlic and vegetables to a large roasting dish with salt and pepper and a drizzle of oil.
6. Mix. Make sure vegetables are in 1 layer at the bottom of the dish.
7. Butterfly the chicken with a sharp knife. Trim off any excess skin and fat. Remove the chicken butt. Turn the chicken over and flatten out.
8. Arrange the butterflied chicken, skin side down on top of the vegetables in the roasting dish.
9. Brush or drizzle half of the marinade onto the inside of the chicken. Salt and pepper generously. Carefully turn the chicken over so that the skin side is up and season in the same way.
10. Bake for 40 minutes at 200°C.

Serve with a salad.