This Family recipe for authentic roasted lemon Greek chicken and potatoes recipe is a delicious and flavorful dish that combines tender crispy chicken and melt in your mouth garlicky potatoes, all infused with Mediterranean herbs.

I do not know one Greek person who does not like this dish: Roasted chicken and potatoes (kotopoulo kai patates sto fourno). It is comforting, delicious and reliable. It was a typical Sunday noon dish and along with a salad and some cheese it makes up a complete meal, fit for company.

Today, chicken may seem a “lesser” dish to offer to guests, but that was not always the case years ago in Greece. Chickens were not so easy to come by, you either had your own hencoop which you occasionally “sacrificed” a chicken for a meal, but that was not very often as they would rather keep the chickens for their eggs. You also could find some live chickens at the open market, but they were not cheap as there were simply not many of them. There were no commercial chicken houses. And after you bought the chicken or took it from your backyard you had to deal with whole other process of preparing it for cooking… So not really an easy dish in the old days.

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