Baked chicken with lemon, potato + olives

This meal, taken from Bill Granger's Feed me Now book is so easy to prepare and tastes delicious. His recipe suggests using a whole chicken jointed but I cheat here and just buy chicken breasts and and maybe chicken thighs too (anything to make things a bit simpler :)  I also find that you can swap or add in other ingredients easily, such as here where I threw in some mushrooms as I wanted to use them up.

Serves 4

1kg roasting potatoes
1 red onion, cut into wedges
75g green olives
1 lemon, sliced
50 pancetta, cut into strips
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
120ml chicken stock
4 chicken breasts (and/or thighs!)
1 tablespoon olive oil

Method

Preheat the oven to 180c.  Cut the potatoes into chunks and place in a roasting tin or ovenproof dish.  Scatter over the onion, olives, lemon, pancetta and bay leaves.  Stir the tomato paste and balsamic vinegar into the stock, then pour over the potatoes, place the chicken pieces on top, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Roast for 50 minutes or until golden.

Once cooked, transfer the chicken to a plate and cover with foil, then return the roasting tin to the oven and increase to 220c.  Roast for a further 10 minutes until the potatoes, onion and lemon slices are well coloured.

Place the chicken back on top of the potatoes, and serve, in the roasting tin.