Day Forty-Eight. Roasted Chicken.

On Day Forty-Eight, I decided to roast a chicken. The entire bird. The task is something I have always wanted to try, since Andre tells me it’s one of the easiest meals to cook. Unfortunately, I purchased a giant 7lb heffer from the store, and by the time I was ready to insert the bird into the hot oven for a couple hours it was about 8pm. So we would be eating my (hopefully) delicious meal at about 10PM. Kind of late for a dinner, but no real problem.

Before I even got to the part where you put the chicken into its cooker I had to take out all of the innards so carefully tucked into the creature’s cavity. I pulled out some of the wrapped gizzardy pieces, but stopped as the paper wrapping began to tear and it became too difficult to pull out the remaining body parts. So I did what I always do when I have a question about cooking or handyman work; I called my parents.

My mother informed me that they should come out easily through either the neck or the butt and I shamefully realized that I did not know the chicken’s top end from it’s bum. I had been yanking pieces solely from the neck. Oops. Problem solved, I returned to dressing the beast on my stove. I stuck in some garlic cloves and onion chunks where I had removed the wrapped goodies and rubbed some softened butter under the breast skin like I had seen Andre do. Then I added bacon, nature’s best food group. I salivated a little and moved the bird to its warm oven to cook for awhile.

A couple hours and several bastings later, the chicken looked ready. My thermometer read the correctly cooked temperature and the sensor that came with the bird had popped out. Patrick and I managed to clumsily carve off a few chunks of chicken for our late dinner and I saved the rest for some sandwiches and salads later in the week. And you know what? It was a pretty tasty meal. So yes, I agree with Dre that roasting a chicken is pretty easy, but also time consuming (if you get a big bird at least). And the bacon was quite yummy  too.