Chicken With [51] Cloves of Garlic

Each and every day I count myself lucky that I have a boyfriend who doesn't have a problem with garlic breath. Obviously one has to stay on top of breath freshness in public but I can't honestly say that I have the wherewithal to carry gum on my person around the house and cutting down isn't an option. On this earth is there anything as delicious and versatile as garlic?
Forget about the fact that almost every meal begins with sautéing it and think about all the amazing dishes that focus on it as a main ingredient: garlic prawns, garlic bread, garlic mushrooms, garlic butter, aioli, garlic soup, hummus, bruschetta and, my personal favourite, roasted garlic.
That's why when I heard about chicken with 40 cloves of garlic I knew I had to make it.
I followed the recipe from Nigella's new book Kitchen; maximum deliciousness for minimum effort.
I browned some chicken thighs skin side down and put them in a roasting tray with some fried spring onions, thyme, a splash of white wine, the chicken browning juices and, of course, the garlic. The recipe said that about 4 bulbs would yield 40 cloves but I ended up with 51 and I couldn't really see the harm in using them all.
Cover the tin and roast at 180 degrees Celsius for 1 1/2 hours.
When I announced on Facebook what I had going in the oven a friend commented "I have done the maths, and the probable result is that you will create a garlic singularity so intense as to doom us all."
This amount of garlic can seem intimidating; a lot of people consider 4 cloves to be dancing on the cliff over the abyss of insanity but cooking the garlic in their skins makes them so sweet and melt-in-your-mouth. I could leave the chicken entirely and just go to town on them by themselves.
While the chicken was cooking Michael and I watched Home Alone and I thought about what we were going to have to go with the chicken. I thought about making some mashed potatoes but I couldn't really be bothered. I still had a bit of arborio rice left over from the other day so I decided to make a second helping of oven risotto.
You might remember my thumb-bite at the ceramic ovenware manufacturers of the world earlier this week when I sauteéd onions directly on the stove in a dish didn't say that it was stove safe.
Well, still riding the high I decided to do it again but this time using my older, slightly cracked blue casserole dish. I had turned my back to do something else when I heard a big clunk and turned around to see that a chunk of the dish had just fallen off it. The stove broke my dish!
I'm afraid to touch it because as you can clearly see it's ready to fall apart in other places too. Just call me rebel without a casserole.
So I transferred my sauteéd onions to the red dish and chucked the risotto in the oven and half an hour later everything was ready.
This was seriously one of the most delicious things I've ever, ever eaten! The garlic was bursting out of its skin and it was amazingly sweet and delicious. Oh and the chicken was incredible too; tender and falling off the bone. Too, too good.
Poor Michael didn't know you were meant to squeeze the innards out and discard the garlic skins but he tells me the skins were delicious as well.The French are definitely onto something. Get it down 'ya!