Set aside an hour to marinate butterflied chicken breasts in oil, lemon, garlic and herbs for this easy recipe. Flattening the chicken means it cooks quickly and evenly, perfect for a chargrill pan. Don't skip the celeriac either! This nutty vegetable is at its best when dressed with a grain mustard mayonnaise. Chargrilling the lemon concentrates its flavour, too.
Get the recipe for lemon and herb chicken with celeriac remoulade here
You can't beat a succulent roast chicken, especially here when it's cooked with preserved lemons, fresh pomegranate, chilli and rosemary which gives the roast a vibrancy. The dukkah adds another level of flavour, it's a Middle Eastern spice mix of toasted hazelnuts, sesame seeds and spices, and works wonderfully on chicken, lamb or salads. You can buy it ready-made, or try our recipe for homemade dukkah here.
There's almost nothing easier than a chicken traybake, where you put it all in the oven at once and the job's done. This is Cajun-spiced chicken, roasted with lots of vegetables, and flavoured with chilli, garlic and chorizo. When it's nearly cooked, some honey gives sweetness to balance out the heat, and adding olives and cashews gives texture and crunch as well as flavour. Any leftovers would be great in a wrap or tortilla.
For a perfect weekend gathering you can't go far wrong with these spicy, crisp chicken skewers served in flatbreads with a crunchy cabbage slaw, pickles and fresh herbs. This dish brings together fresh flavours with well-balanced heat that is very satisfying. It's straightforward to make, but you need a bit of time to sort out the components. The chicken is best marinated overnight. It's served with a dill labneh, a thick, strained yogurt, but you could easily use Greek yogurt instead.
This sweet and sour stir-fry, with plenty of vegetables and a pleasing kick of chilli, serves six – perfect for a Friday night in. As with all great stir-fries, the list of ingredients is quite long, but there's nothing that's hard to track down. The trick is to have all your ingredients prepared before you begin to cook, then it will be ready to serve in just 20 minutes. The fresh ginger gives the dish a zing and the soy and black bean sauce add an umami flavour creating a meal that everyone will love.
Life doesn't get more comforting than this big bowl of goodness – perfect on a grey, miserable day. You'll need to poach a whole chicken for it, but that also gives you the stock you need (plus the bones for another stock). It's a simple, hearty dish, with vegetables, herbs and broken-up spaghetti. Just serve with crusty bread.
This simple twist on a paella is made all in one pan and is ready in just 45 minutes, for a perfect midweek winner. It has a lovely smokiness from smoked paprika and chorizo, with a hint of garlic. Black olives are definitely not traditional in a paella, but their juiciness adds an extra layer of flavour. The lemon juice is important to lift the whole dish with its freshness.
Slow-cooked, melting, spicy chicken is a cinch in a slow-cooker. You can also cook it in the oven and bake the chicken, covered, for two hours on a lowish heat (160°C/fan 140°C/300°F/gas mark 2). A bought jar of barbecue sauce will provide the smoky base. Served with avocado and a chipotle mayo, it's also great in a wrap or served with a jacket potato.
On its own, turmeric can be slightly astringent, but once mixed in this marinade for chicken breasts with honey, yogurt and fresh lime, it becomes delightfully fragrant, with a hint of sweetness. The recipe asks for fresh turmeric, but you can substitute it with 2tsp dried if fresh is hard to track down. Once grilled until browned and crisp on the edges, these kebabs are great in pitta breads with a crunchy salad.
Love crispy chicken skin? Here's a smart hack for this tender, juicy roast chicken. Simply mix baking powder and salt together, rub into the skin and leave for at least 20 minutes for super-crisp skin. The chicken is spatchcocked, meaning the backbone is removed and the bird flattened. This ensures it doesn't dry out as it cooks evenly. There's a simple herby garlic and paprika marinade to make, then just serve with a crunchy salad and fries.
This easy chicken bake will be a sure winner with the kids. It's so simple, with few ingredients – rice, chicken, smoked paprika, cheese and tortilla chips, with a jar of pasta sauce. It is with a tomato-based sauce, but the choice is up to you whether you prefer it creamy, spicy or herby. Topped with cheesy, crunchy tortilla chips, it's on the table in just 40 minutes.
Get the recipe for smoky baked chicken with tortillas and rice here
Fans of Vietnamese food love the zingy, clean flavours from crisp, fresh vegetables and herbs, often with the added crunch of chopped peanuts. This healthy salad certainly fits the bill, there's very little cooking involved, too. A simple dressing completes the salad – it's sweet, from sugar, and sour, from fish sauce and lime juice. You could add some cooked, chilled rice noodles to make a more filling dish.
This tender, shredded chicken is spicy and aromatic. It's cooked with a creamy yogurt spice mixture before being piled into wraps and served with a crunchy onion, carrot and fennel salad. Quick to make in around 30 minutes, you could also serve it with basmati rice, with a dollop of mint raita on the side.
This easy Middle Eastern-style tray-bake is definitely worth a try – crisp chicken filled with a spicy, garlicky, nutty stuffing and cooked with potatoes which become wonderfully crunchy as they absorb the fat and juices from the chicken. Serve it with a green salad dressed with a mustardy vinaigrette, green beans or a dish of cooling, sliced cucumber.
Get the recipe for herb, garlic and chilli-stuffed chicken here
Don't stress about the long list of spices in this wonderfully aromatic curry. It's pretty forgiving if you miss out a couple and if you can't find fresh curry leaves, it will be just as good with dried. The rich tomato sauce is thickened with ground almonds, then flaked almonds are added for extra crunch. Serve with basmati rice on the side.
Ditch the takeaway and rustle up this easy chicken noodle stir-fry in around half an hour. It's loaded with different vegetables and very little fat, so it's a perfect healthy option for midweek. It's sweet, sharp and sour and the Chinese five-spice ensures that you also have aromatics, heat and umami in the flavours – just remember to have everything prepped and weighed out before you begin to cook.
Musakhan is the national dish of Palestine. It's a big sharing platter of chicken roasted in spices such as cinnamon, cumin and allspice, served with grilled flat breads and melted spicy onions and pine nuts. Sumac, a popular Middle Eastern spice, is key in this dish, it's from a berry which has a pronounced citrus flavour and is traditionally used when lemons are out of season.
A light, fragrant chicken noodle soup from Vietnam. It's nourishing, healthy and quick to prepare. You just need to allow some time for the whole chicken to poach in a spiced broth. It's made with rice noodles, so gluten-free if you also use a gluten-free stock cube. Once cooked, it's topped with a fragrant garnish of herbs, onion and chilli, with a refreshing squeeze of lime.
Romesco is a tomato-based sauce from Spain. It's sweet, smoky, garlicky and spicy, perfect with tender chicken with a crisp skin. You can also use the sauce for fish and pasta. The chicken is topped with a "picada", a crunchy garnish of roasted nuts flavoured with shallots and sherry vinegar. Just serve with sautéed potatoes and a green salad.
Katsu is a Japanese fried chicken dish, where chicken fillets are fried in panko crumbs. Panko are light and airy, and absorb less oil than standard breadcrumbs. They're also now widely available. The crispy chicken is served on a bed of stir-fried udon noodles and vegetables, tossed in a miso sauce hitting those delicious umami notes. Any leftover sauce is great stirred into fried rice.
A great peri peri chicken will certainly liven up your taste buds, with its signature flavours of hot chilli and garlic. Sure, it's easy to buy a ready-made sauce, but it's equally simple to make your own at home. There aren't many ingredients, and the taste is in roasting the chillies, garlic and onion until soft, before blitzing them in a food processor and serving them with the roast chicken and spicy potatoes.
Sticky, caramelised chicken pieces in a fragrant sauce makes a perfect one-pan dish for midweek. It needs 70g ginger, which is a fairly big piece, around the size of the palm of your hand. Use a teaspoon to scrape it quickly and without waste to get into those tricky nooks and crannies. Serve with steamed rice and stir-fried greens.
Once you've cooked a spatchcocked chicken (a chicken with the backbone removed) you'll come back to it again and again. The chicken cooks evenly, without drying out and gives an all-over crispy skin. This herby chicken is cooked on the barbecue with green beans, but you could use a hot oven and cook the beans on a griddle pan. It's tender, herby and juicy – a really simple recipe.
Get the recipe for spatchcocked chicken with green beans here
If you thought a great paella was time-consuming, think again. Here it is, in all its glory, made in one pan in the oven. So once you've prepared the ingredients, it's a simple chuck it in the oven job. Smoky from the chorizo, sweet from the peppers, with delicate spice from saffron. Just serve with lemon wedges to squeeze over to lift the flavours to the next level.
Here's a dish that tastes even better than it looks. A creamy, coconut chicken noodle curry, lightly spiced, it's topped with fresh herbs, shallots, soft egg and chilli. For a final flourish, add crispy fried noodles, which are worth the effort, adding a moreish crunch. The chicken curry can be made ahead and frozen, too.
This succulent roast chicken is served with a creamy, buttery Parmesan sauce. The cheese adds a rich, savoury and umami note to the dish. Fresh tarragon, with its gentle aniseed aroma and flavour, is a perfect partner to chicken. A squeeze of fresh lemon adds extra zing and freshness.
Get the recipe for roast chicken with lemon, herb and Parmesan sauce here
Chicken pieces are slowly braised in a tantalising sauce which is sweet, sour and savoury. It contains preserved lemon, which, if you're using it for the first time, adds an intense, sour citrus flavour. Only use the pith, and discard the flesh. It's topped with roughly chopped almonds, but use whole nuts, not flaked. It can all be prepared ahead of time, then reheated to serve.
Get the recipe for braised chicken with almonds, olive and raisins here
Here's a clever twist on a classic schnitzel, where the crumb contains toasted hazelnuts, Parmesan, lemon and fresh herbs. You can use whichever herbs you have to hand, though thyme will really sing out. Look for blanched whole hazelnuts for ease. With the skin on, you have to roast them, then rub in a tea towel to remove the skin, which is rather time-consuming!
A hearty and healthy one-pan dish everyone in the family will enjoy, this recipe sees chicken thighs cooked up with caramelised red onion, sweet apples and Savoy cabbage giving the dish lovely warming sweet and savoury notes. You can also add cooked lentils or chickpeas to the pot if the clan is extra hungry. The chestnuts can be replaced with walnuts, if you prefer.
Get the recipe for chicken with red onion, apple and chestnuts here
These chicken gyros make a nourishing lunch or quick dinner. A simple marinade of oregano, lemon, garlic and yogurt tenderises the chicken and once cooked, it's served in warm pittas with homemade tzatziki and tomato salsa. The freshness of the citrus in this dish is wonderful with the woody herb flavours of oregano.
A Tex-Mex special, hot and spicy chicken fajitas are always a favourite. The Cajun-spice adds aromatic flavours of paprika with herb notes from oregano so that this dish has many layers. Halve the quantity of red and green chillies in the recipe for a version with less heat and avoid adding the seeds unless you like it really hot. A dollop of sour cream and avocado slices also temper the heat.
A less fussy (and lower calorie) version of the Italian classic, this recipe is a top choice for a midweek dinner. Chicken breast, passata and courgettes are all cooked in the same pot, topped with mozzarella, Parmesan and breadcrumbs, and then slid under the grill until golden. It’s quick, healthy and there’s very little washing up.
A big, bubbling pot of this rich, saucy stew won’t hang around for long. It contains chicken thighs, chorizo, tomatoes and tinned black beans making it an umami-rich dish that is hearty. It's slow-cooked for two hours until meltingly tender. Any leftovers can be frozen. Serve with buttered seasonal vegetables or a green salad.
Not to be confused with saucy chicken tikka masala, chicken tikka consists of chicken chunks cooked on a skewer. This recipe uses succulent chicken thighs marinated in ginger, garlic, chillies, rice vinegar and turmeric to give heat, acidity and aromatic notes. The skewers are then basted in butter and grilled until lightly charred which gives them a lovely texture.
These chicken wings and drumsticks, cooked with jalapeños, honey, garlic, lime and orange juice, more than deliver on flavour. The key is to keep basting them while they're in the oven to ensure the sweet, spicy sauce is absorbed. Serve with a steaming bowl of rice on the side.
Get the recipe for chicken with lime, orange, and jalapeño here
This chicken and coconut broth is a great recipe for using up leftover cooked chicken or pork. The richness of the coconut allows for a comforting bowl of food. It's quick and easy, using shop-bought curry paste to speed things up. The dish is not too spicy either, so everyone will love it.
Get the recipe for Thai-style chicken and coconut broth here
Infused with ginger, garlic, cumin and chilli, this easy chicken curry is sure to become a household favourite. The zing of the ginger and the earthy notes of cumin give depth to this dish. It'll freeze really well too, so make a double batch and have portions on standby for another time.
For a tasty and speedy midweek meal, teriyaki chicken should be one for your list. The sweet, sticky sauce is hard to beat. Rice or noodles and a light cucumber and radish salad are all you need to go with it. The toasted sesame seeds add a final crunch.
Served with a crunchy Middle Eastern-inspired slaw, creamy garlic sauce and a quick lemon pickle, these chicken kebabs are packed with flavour. However, you can swap in your own favourite condiments to save time – the buttermilk chicken will still taste just as good.
Korean fried chicken, with its sweet, spicy glaze, takes a bit of time and effort – but it's worth every minute. And if you can, you should also make the pickled radish cubes – they're the perfect accompaniment to these rich and sticky chicken bites.
Healthy and super tasty, these chicken skewers are marinated in a yogurt and spice mixture which gives the meat a lovely crust when grilled. They're served with a zingy apple and pea chutney, and sautéed spinach. If you want something more filling, serve with some wholegrain rice.
Fiery Buffalo wings are a great weekend project. You can easily double up the recipe if you have wing-lovers over. Made with paprika to give depth and a peppery hot sauce these wings are packed with flavour. Serve them with a cooling blue-cheese dip and celery sticks to cut through the heat, then kick back and enjoy them with a cold beer.
Have a go at making these moreish chicken skewers at home. Marinating the meat in ginger, garlic and turmeric is the key to the flavour – it needs to be left for at least 12 hours – and allows the chicken to take on a depth that is aromatic and zingy. The crunchy, spicy peanut sauce is simple and ready in under 10 minutes adding in another layer of flavour to the dish.
Taleggio is a well-flavoured Italian soft cheese that melts to perfection. Add fragrant pesto, crunchy breadcrumbs and slightly acidic vine tomatoes, this is a tasty chicken traybake to serve six. Accompany it with a crisp green salad and some steamed new potatoes.
Get the recipe for chicken with pesto, Taleggio and tomatoes here
Don't be put off if you've never made pad Thai noodles before. You probably have many of the ingredients – including soy sauce, fish sauce, ginger and garlic – already in your pantry. This dish hits lots of flavour profiles, sweet, sour, savoury and umami. Finish the dish with fresh coriander and mint leaves and a squeeze of lime, and add some crispy onions and peanuts for an extra crunch.
The family will love this Moroccan-inspired one-pot meal. Tender chicken thighs are cooked in harissa, a hot chilli paste from North Africa, and warming turmeric. Fragrant apricot and cinnamon rice, topped with toasted pistachios, makes the dish a filling supper.
There's always room for a new twist on roast chicken. This recipe uses a warming ginger and paprika rub on the chicken and serves it with a zingy ginger, garlic and watercress mayo. It's guaranteed to have everyone coming back for seconds. Serve with new potatoes and seasonal greens.
This Taiwanese stir-fry, known as "three-cup chicken", traditionally contains a cup of soy sauce, a cup of toasted sesame oil and a cup of rice wine. This tasty and speedy twist on the classic recipe doesn't quite follow those measurements, but still features the key ingredients, plus aromatics like ginger, chilli and sweet basil.
Allspice, Scotch bonnet chillies, fresh ginger and more make up a punchy marinade for Caribbean-style jerk chicken. To add extra smokiness and flavour, cook it on the barbecue. And if you don't want to use a whole bird, you can also use chicken thighs and drumsticks with the skin on.
Crisp, barbecued chicken served with a mayo-based hot sauce really ticks all the boxes. The sauce is served with the chicken and used as a baste, so there's little effort involved. If it's not barbecue weather, you can roast the chicken in the oven at 180°C/fan 160°C/350°F/gas mark 4. Combined with garlicky croutons and roasted tomatoes which adds a depth of flavour, this is a great dish to serve with crisp French fries on the side.
There are few dishes more wholesome than a chicken pot pie. Plus, it can be seriously speedy and straightforward if you buy shop-bought pastry (check the freezer section if you're in the USA) and have leftover chicken and vegetables in the fridge to use. A good squeeze of lemon will lift the comforting flavours and give it a zest. Serve it piping hot with buttery mash and extra seasonal veggies.
The great thing about this creamy, tasty pie is that you can make the filling the day before serving, so it becomes a simple family feast for midweek. It also uses shop-bought puff pastry, so there's little effort involved. It's served with a watercress sauce on the side, so all you need to do is add some seasonal green vegetables, such as kale or spinach to balance the indulgence of the pie.
Chicken, bacon and mushroom are three ingredients that go so well together, a classic combination. Here they're mixed with leeks, fresh thyme and a hint of mustard in a creamy sauce, these flavours make the dish a gentle warming one. It's all topped with ready-made puff pastry for a buttery, flaky lid.
Chicken thighs are cooked in a tomato-based sauce, sweetened with red peppers, livened up with harissa paste and garlic. You can make this ahead of time, but make the crust just before serving. Use fresh or frozen corn kernels for the baked crispy topping, which you simply whiz up to make a batter. Serve with a simple green salad.
Crisp and golden fried chicken always goes down a treat and these drumsticks are seasoned with a mix of thyme, cumin, cayenne pepper and mustard powder for delicious results. Just serve with a crunchy coleslaw and homemade potato wedges for everyone to dive in.
Can you think of anything more comforting than a big bowl of steaming chicken and dumpling soup? A whole chicken is used here to make the broth rich and savoury. Throw in fluffy, herby dumplings, just spongy enough to absorb the stock and you've got yourself a warming dish.
Nothing beats homemade chicken burgers, and these ones are sure to be a crowd-pleaser. They're lightly coated in spiced flour and then baked until golden. Once your burgers are out of the oven, it's time for the fun part: loading up your bun with gherkins, avocado, spicy mayonnaise, lettuce and whatever else you fancy.
If you're short on time, don't worry – this Thai green curry can be on the table in under half an hour. Mild and creamy, it uses good-quality, shop-bought curry paste and a tin of coconut milk. Serve it with sticky jasmine rice and slices of red chilli for some heat. It's garnished with Thai basil to give freshness, but you could use coriander and mint instead.
Butter chicken is a decadent dinner that's well worth learning to make. The chicken is rubbed in a tangy tandoori masala spice mix and browned, then stirred into a rich, creamy fragrant sauce. You could even make your own chapatti (here's a recipe) to go with it, or serve with hot naan breads.
Ideally, you should marinate this Mexican chicken overnight, to really get maximum flavour. Ancho chillies are quite mild and very fruity, and are used in the dry rub for the marinade. The chicken cavity is stuffed with orange, ginger and garlic, to keep the chicken moist. It's served with a crunchy slaw dressed with a punchy orange dressing.