Cooking a meal for my man

Mike loves to cook. That's a fact. So, in the year and a half of our dating, I have never cooked anything for him on my own. So, we were flipping through my new cookbook, The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, and we decided to cook one of the proposed meals in the back. Mike wasn't feeling well, so I took this as an opportunity to make him a delicious meal.

Meal:

• Roast Lemon Chicken (318)
  
• Fast Buttery Peas (136)
  
• Roasted Red Potatoes (141)
  

I think the chicken turned out nicely. Lots of flavor. The dark meat still had a bit of pinkish tint to it -- I probably would've eaten it, but Mike asked me nicely not to, so I stopped. This reminds me that I need to purchase a meat thermometer.

The peas were yummy, and really simple to do. Adding the shallot and thyme just jazzes up your basic old peas.

I got pretty huffy about those potatoes because they took longer to do than I expected. First, I didn't read the entire recipe, so my timing on these was way off. That's my bad (although it gave me the excuse to use my warming drawer for the chicken). But even after I cooked the potatoes according to the time in the recipe, I found that they were not browned enough. The ones on the edge were, but the middle ones were not. This was frustrating. Once they finally came out of the oven and onto the plate, however, they were actually pretty good. Just not totally browned, as I thought they should be.

Overall, I thought the meal was pretty successful, other than the temporary mild tantrum of "Well, I guess that just goes to show you I can't cook!" Not a shining moment, but I got over it.