Quick supper: savoury chicken

This supper takes less than five minutes to prepare, 40 minutes to cook, and is my new favourite. It's hardly a recipe, really.

I'm leaving quantities up to you, but you're aiming for roughly equal amounts of chicken, potato and onion. Tonight I'm using chicken breasts (cut into two lengthwise), but it's just as good with thighs, and would work with other joints. Or a jointed chicken, if you're up to such a thing.

Savoury chicken with roasted onion and potato

chicken pieces
onions, red for preference
waxy potatoes
fat garlic cloves
rosemary
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
Maldon salt
pepper

Heat the oven to 200C. Find a roasting dish big enough to take all your ingredients.

Peel the onions and slice them thickly. Add an equal amount of potato: you can use baby potatoes for this, but I prefer to use slightly larger ones cut into two or four, as the cut edges become satisfyingly crunchy. Chuck in some cloves of garlic, separated but not peeled, enough for at least one per person. Add the chicken pieces. Chop a good lot of rosemary needles onto this (saving a couple of sprigs), then douse in oil and a little balsamic vinegar. Mix it all up well. Crumble salt over the dish, grind on as much pepper as you like, and top with two or three sprigs of rosemary.

Cook for 40 minutes (the exact timing will depend on the size of your chicken joints).

When the chicken is cooked, everything else should be cooked through and blackening at the edges. Make sure everyone has a clove of garlic to squeeze out onto their plate, making a sweet and unctuous sauce.

Good with green salad. Or tomato salad.

PS this is good warm, as well as hot from the oven. Just as well, because supper is now ready and Lucius is still in the workshop - I can hear him hammering. I'm not complaining, he's building the world's most beautiful pergola