Julie Van Rosendaal's chicken caesar salad recipe

Julia Child once famously said the real test of a good cook is a perfectly roasted chicken.

So how exactly do you do it? And with what should you serve it?

The Calgary Eyeopener's food guide Julie Van Rosendaal stopped by on Tuesday to share her chicken roasting tips and a recipe for chicken caesar salad.

Julie's roasted chicken caesar salad

I saw a technique years ago in which chicken was roasted atop chunks of bread to produce croutons infused with chicken drippings — which is essentially those crispy bits of stuffing you pick at and eat yourself as the turkey comes out of the oven. It's the very best part of Thanksgiving dinner and with this technique, you wind up with a whole sheet of it.

In this salad, inspired by Jamie Oliver, you roast the chicken and the croutons together, which makes sense time-wise but also makes them spectacularly delicious.

You then lay a few strips of bacon over the lot to up the ante, pull and chop up the lot and scatter it over a platter of crunchy romaine, then douse it all in garlicky dressing and Parmesan.

Rather than set this up as a recipe per se, I'm going to walk you through how I did it, because measurements here aren't too important. 

I used chicken thighs, which are much more flavourful than breasts.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Get a big, rimmed baking sheet and spread out cubes of good crusty bread, like ciabatta. Add chicken thighs to the pan and drizzle everything generously with olive oil. Toss it about with your hands to coat everything, then spread out the bread cubes and place the chicken on top. If you like, tuck in a few sprigs of rosemary. 

Bake for about 40 minutes, taking the pan out and rearranging everything at some point if you feel like it, getting rid of any croutons around the perimeter that are browning too quickly, and then lay a few strips of bacon over everything and return the pan to the oven for another 10 minutes or so, until everything is nicely crisped up and the chicken is cooked through.

Meanwhile, fill a large platter (or as many plates as you have people eating) with torn or chopped Romaine (I added a few chopped leaves of kale too), and mix up a caesar dressing. I like to do this by dolling up some good mayo with lemon juice, garlic, a squeeze of anchovy paste if you're into it, and plenty of freshly grated Parmesan cheese and black pepper. Top the lettuce with torn or chopped chicken, bacon and croutons, and drizzle with creamy dressing.

Eat outside, if it's not raining.

• MORE RECIPES | Julie Van Rosendaal's favourite pancake recipes
• MORE RECIPES | Chocolate stout cake and beef & ale pie: Julie Van Rosendaal's beer recipes

With files from Julie Van Rosendaal and the Calgary Eyeopener