Roast Chicken, Sausage and Vegetables Over Croutons

Given the choice between candy and bread, I’m going to choose bread.  And anytime I can sop up any kind of sauce with a crusty, chewy hunk of well-made bread, I sop with gusto.

Years ago, I discovered Ina Garten’s Lemon Roast Chicken recipe, where she stuffs a whole chicken with tons of lemons and onions and then serves the lemony chicken over toasted bread.  Since the bread is toasted, it absorbs all the juice from the chicken, but holds its form and becomes a mouthful of chewy, savory, tenderness with the lemony flavor spilling out all over your tongue.  After I ate that, any other roast chicken just seemed inferior.

I riffed on the chicken-over-croutons idea the other night.  I had a bunch of vegetables from the Farmer’s Market that I needed to use, and I wanted to kick up the flavor, so I added a locally-made feta and spinach chicken sausage to the mix.  The result was a succulent delight.

There’s so much you could do with this to make it your own – use what you have, use what you want.  Make it YOUR kind of delicious treat.  And then tell me about it!

Roast Chicken, Sausage and Vegetables Over Croutons

1 lb. bulk feta and spinach chicken sausage

2 chicken breasts, bone-in, skin-on

2 tomatoes on the vine

1 red onion

1 portabello mushroom

1 small zucchini

1/2 red bell pepper

olive oil

Kosher salt

fresh ground pepper

1/2 loaf day-old Como bread, or other type of hearty, crusty bread

Kalamata olives

Fresh basil

In a large baking dish, break up the sausage.  Place the chicken breasts on top.  Drizzle the chicken with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.  Quarter the tomatoes, slice the red onion and chop the zucchini and pepper into bite size pieces.  Toss the vegetables in a bowl, drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.  Pour vegetables over the chicken.  Bake at 450 for 40 minutes, until the chicken moist and running clear juices.

While the chicken is cooking, slice the bread into 1″ thick pieces, then chop each piece into bite-size squares. Place on a baking sheet.  Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.  Toss with your hands to coat the bread evenly.  Place the bread on a lower shelf in the oven and toast for about 20 minutes, until crunchy and golden brown.

To serve, place the bread pieces on a platter.  Spoon the sausage and the vegetables from the baking dish over the bread.  Carve the chicken and place on top of the vegetables.  Pour half the juices from the baking pan over the chicken, vegetables and bread.  There will be a lot of juices, so reserve the other half for the leftovers, if there are any!  Garnish with a handful of Kalamata olives and some fresh basil.  Lightly drizzle olive oil over the platter to finish.