Foolproof Roast Chicken

Is your mouth watering yet?  I know mine is.

Roast chicken is one of those things that is incredibly impressive and impossibly easy.  It mostly just requires that you give it tons of love, care and time.  The only trick I have with this: high heat and clean oven.

This recipe is super tweakable.

Foolproof Roast Chicken

(List of ingredients are on the fly – use what you have, don’t use what you don’t.)

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F (on the roast setting, if possible.)

Clean your chicken. Yes, yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck.  This may mean taking off its neck, taking out some organs, trimming the flappy skin off, cleaning out the inside of the carcass.  Yes, I will admit it, I’m a wimp and I wore gloves. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

Put your chicken into a baking dish.  Rub your chicken down with room-temperature butter.  Similarly, you could give it a nice douse of olive oil – but butter tastes better.

Salt and pepper generously on both sides of the chicken.

This is where you can get creative.  What do you want to stuff your chicken with?  I like a few chunks of butter, a cut up onion, a bundle of fresh herbs (thyme or something else peppery and savory) and maybe half a lemon, sliced.

More fun decisions.  What would you like your chicken to lay on?  I like more onions, the other half of the lemon, sliced, an unpeeled bulb of garlic, sliced in half horizontally, baby carrots and more fresh herbs.

Throw it into the oven, giving it about 12 to 15 minutes per pound of chicken.  The butter is going to melt and have the chicken cook in all its juices, infused with all the herbs and veggies.  The skin is going to be amazingly golden-brown and crisp – so crispy that it cracks.  To. Die. For.

Best of all, while this bird is cooking you can take your time and make whatever side dishes you desire.

I finally invested in some ramekins and I decided to make those vegetable soufflés again – this time, in the proper dishes.  (Because I was going to be making the soufflés that require the oven at 400 degrees, I cooked the chicken for longer and then lowered the temperature for the oven for the last 30 or so minutes for the soufflés.)

They turned out beautifully!  Golden and almost flaky on the top, foamy and creamy in the center.  Much more fun way to eat broccoli (that’s what’s in them!  Along with some onions and cheddar.)

Well balanced dinner, I say!