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.

The Lazy Man’s Mac and Cheese

This is my mac and cheese.  It doesn’t require eight different (expensive) cheeses, vigourous whisking, or making a roux.  It is just scrumptiously cheesy, incredibly rustic, and ridiculously easy to make.  It reminds me of a mac and cheese that a friend’s grandmother made that I once tried and loved.  Best of all, it holds up in the fridge really well, so you could make a batch and feast off it for a few meals.  Now don’t expect some rich saucy type mac and cheese.  You’ve already been told that I’m not a fan of sauce.