The Octopus roasts a chicken
400F, s+p & oil or butter. 15min/lb + 10min. Easy.
We used to raise chickens, back when we had acreage. We raised a batch of ugly but tasty Cornish X as meat birds every year, plus we also had a variety of different breeds of birds for eggs--fat and fluffy Barred Rock and Black Australorps, mostly, plus some tiny bantams just for fun. As a consequence, we always had whole, frozen chickens in the freezer. I've never enjoyed cutting up raw chicken, so I mostly cooked them whole. About once a week, we'd have a roast chicken. They were very, very tasty.
My recipe is basically Nigella Lawson's roast chicken from her beautifully chatty cookbook, How to Eat. Reading it is very much like sitting down with a friend who gives you all the details about how she makes something--worth taking a look at it, if you enjoy that sort of thing. I find that I'm losing patience with recipe website (so much filler, so many ads!) and going back to my cookbook collection instead. I love spending Sunday afternoons (sometimes! not always!) with a stack of cookbooks, finding the perfect thing to cook.
So, to roast a chicken:
If the chicken is frozen, ideally move it to the fridge the night before so it can thaw. Alternately, you can spend the day with the still-wrapped chicken in a sink of cold water that you drain and refill every few hours. Much more of a hassle, but it'll get the bird defrosted.
Preheat the oven to 400F.
Weigh your chicken--still wrapped up is fine--or make a note of the weight on the label. This will tell you how long to cook the bird for: plan on fifteen minutes for each pound, plus an extra ten minutes. So a four pound chicken will cook for an hour and ten minutes (15 x 4 + 10 = 70 = 1hr 10 min). A six pound bird cooks for an hour and forty minutes (15 x 6 + 10 = 100 = 1hr 40 min). It might be a good idea to jot the number down so you can remember it later.
Prepare the chicken for roasting: remove it from its wrapping, check for a bag of innards, and pat it dry. Put it in a roasting pan just large enough for it without being enormous. I use an oval enameled cast-iron pan. You can origami the wingtips under, if you'd like, but I don't usually bother unless it's a big bird and the wings start poking out the sides of the pan.
If you're feeling ambitious and fancy, you can put some aromatics inside the cavity--a cut up lemon, some herbs, onion, garlic. Whatever floats your boat. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, depending on how utilitarian I'm feeling and what I have on hand.
Drizzle some olive oil on top of the bird. If you want to go all out, use melted butter which makes for a spectacularly rich flavor. But olive oil works too. This helps the skin crisp up. Then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Add herbs and spices here too, if you want.
Roast, uncovered, for the hour and whatever that you'd calculated earlier. Usually, for my oven, the timing is pretty reliable. There are two signs that it's done: the juices run clear when you poke it, and if you (carefully) take hold of the end of a leg and wiggle it, you'll be able to feel it move fairly freely.
The last hurdle is cutting it up. I tend to be fairly pragmatic about this and don't worry about having a lovely, Martha Stewart platter of imaculately cut-up chicken to present. I just focus on getting as much meat off the carcass and onto a serving plate as I can. It's not pretty. The meat from the breast can get sliced off in a way that's fairly good looking, but after those pieces come off, there's still plenty of meat beneath that you can just pick out any which way. The legs and thighs get seperated at the joints. At the top of the thighs, on the underside of the bird there's two small discs of muscle that you won't want to forget. They're the cook's portion, like broccoli stems, delicious and tender.
After dinner is over and the carcass has cooled, I go through and thoroughly pick out the rest of the meat to use for another meal. Chicken salad--the meat mixed with mayo and chopped celery--works out very well for lunch the next day. The bones can go into the freezer to make stock later, or into a slow cooker overnight.
For the four of us, which currently includes two teenagers, I can usually get two meals out of the chicken easily. When the kids were little and didn't eat nearly as much, it was more like three or four, especially if I worked at stretching it out.
The key to the recipe is this: 400F, s+p & oil or butter. 15min/lb + 10min. Everything else is just details.
I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.
Warmly,
Adrienne