Baked chicken with marmalade glaze

This is one of those delightfully easy “stick it in the oven and forget about it” supper dishes. Other than green veg or salad, you won’t need anything with it, and even drab supermarket chicken will be suitably perked up. It’s from a Sainsbury’s magazine, slightly adapted by me: the original called for halved new potatoes, but it seemed entirely implausible to me that they would cook from raw in the oven in 45 minutes. So I cut my (non-new) potatoes into 2-cm chunks, and they were just barely cooked in an hour. If you do want to use larger pieces, you’d be well advised to parboil them for about 3 minutes first, but this makes a bit more work.

I cooked this in two gratin dishes; it will serve about six.

3 red peppers, deseeded and cut into 4-6 pieces depending on size
2 medium red onions, cut into wedges
800 g potatoes, cut into bite-size pieces
2 tbs olive oil
6 chicken thighs
4 tbsp marmalade
1 tsp harissa
juice of 1/2 lemon
zest and juice of 1 orange
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200C (180C fan oven). Divide the prepared vegetables between two gratin dishes or roasting tins, season with salt and pepper, then pour a glug of olive oil over each dish and use your hands to toss everything and coat the vegetables. Put the chicken on top of the vegetables.

Mix together all the remaining ingredients in a small bowl and pour over the chicken in both dishes. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, until chicken and potatoes are cooked. Stir after 30 minutes or so, and towards the end of cooking time check again to make sure the chicken isn’t unduly charred. Cover with foil if it needs further cooking.