Oven-Barbecued Chicken

The thing about working from this recipe binder that was put together in 1981 is that it assumes a certain level of knowledge about how well one knows their way around a kitchen. 9/10 times I can figure out what the recipe is saying but sometimes I just have no idea.

(This would also be a good place to add that the recipes in this 1981 binder were assembled by my mom and she sourced them primarily from her side of the family. Her family was raised on a farm in Southwestern Virginia and A LOT of the verbiage is lost on me – a person who was raised in Southeastern NC and spent the majority of my formative years concerned with things like basketball, punk rock and petting dogs. Certainly not cooking.)

(Me visiting Chilhowie, VA where my mother grew up in what feels like another lifetime)

At any rate, two weekends ago I took a trip to Burlington, NC to visit my dad’s side of the family. I was telling my aunt about this blog “project” (as of now I haven’t really been sharing the link to this outside of my friend group and certain family members). Once I mentioned the recipe binder my aunt got up and pulled her copy off a shelf in her kitchen. We started thumbing through the pages and she stopped at this recipe for “Oven-Barbecued Chicken.” She told me that this was a good one and I should make it because Danny would probably like it.

This was when I pointed out to her that I had looked at this as a recipe to try but had no idea what “2 cut-up frying chickens” meant. In my mind, I envisioned buying whole chickens from the store and needing to disassemble them into individual pieces. Given that I have just recently started eating meat again this was not an endeavor that I was super interested in partaking in.

She told me that all I really needed to do was buy a pack of 4 chicken breasts and 4 thighs and put them in a pan with the sauce. The sauce she told me was “out of this world good.” And so, when I got back home after my visit I decided to give it a shot.

This one takes awhile to cook but the assembly is pretty easy. I will likely add it to the regular rotation. My only other experience making BBQ chicken was in a crock pot and this was 100% better. We had leftovers for 3 additional meals and (as Danny says) the reheat value on it was excellent.