Rosemary Food-Coma

This Thanksgiving break, while I was home visiting my family, they told me (to my GREAT joy) that I could borrow their little dutch oven. Granted, it isn't technically dutch oven, as in... you can't stick it on top of a camp fire and it doesn't have a lip on the lid, but it is an enameled cast iron pot. Horray! Why horray? Well, you can stick it in the oven. Something I certainly cannot do with my other cookware, and the thought of simply putting raw materials into a pot and having it emerge from the oven all amazing and yummy was quite exhilarating.. I had to try it. Plus I really wanted to make something soothing and comforting to combat the cold weather. On top of it all, it ended up being a wonderful source of leftovers. Hello lunch for the studio!

Rosemary Food Coma
You'll need:
2-4 carrots
1 red bell pepper
3 stalks of celery
1-2 yellow Italian squashes (or you can use zucchini)
4-6 sprigs of Rosemary
1 C. whole mushrooms
about 1 lb of potatoes (I used fingerling heirlooms)
1 small yellow onion
1 clove garlic
2-3 boneless skinless chicken breasts (it depends on how many you're serving)
Garlic Salt/Pepper
Olive oil
1/2 C white wine 

Preheat the oven to 450° and put the dutch oven into the oven to preheat. 
Chop the carrots, pepper, celery, squashes, mushrooms, onion and potatoes. Cut them into fairly uniform sizes so that they'll cook evenly. I ended up leaving the mushrooms whole and just cutting the rest of the veggies to be about the same size. Finely chop the garlic, put them all into a bowl, and toss them with a liberal amount of olive oil, garlic salt, and pepper. Next, remove the dutch oven from the oven (use oven mitts! It sounds like common sense, but for some reason, my little dutch oven looked so innocent sitting there waiting for vegetables... but really it was searing hot!)

Put the veggies into the dutch oven and pause to enjoy the satisfying sizzling noise that it should make :) Lay half of the rosemary on top of the layer of veggies.  Then, salt and pepper both sides of the chicken breasts and lay them on top of the rosemary. Then, you'll lay the other half of the rosemary on top of the chicken. Now, place the lid on top of the dutch oven, and put it into the oven for 35-45 minutes (depending on how hot your oven actually runs) 15 minutes into the cooking time, add the white wine. When it emerges from the oven, it will fill your teensy apartment (or at least your kitchen) with the lovely scent of rosemary magic. The veggies should be fork-tender, the chick should be cooked through, and there should be a fair amount of delicious broth lingering in the bottom of the dutch oven. Remove the rosemary, cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces, plate it with some veggies, and add a few spoonfulls of the yum yum broth on top. Then, succumb to the following rosemary food coma glory. 

Yum Foodie Foodie!