I decided to roast a chicken. "Why?" you ask. Why not!? It turned out really well, although the seasonings didn't make it very far into the meat. I think brineing it first may have helped, but I don't think I am capable of thinking far enough ahead to do that successfully. Tonight I made chili, and I meant to put the beans in to soak last night, but forgot, so I thought I would have time to do it this morning, but forgot again. Luckily you can do a rushed soak on dried beans that turns out fine. Although I had a hard time getting the chili to stay seasoned. I would add the spices and it would taste pretty good, but when I went back to taste it a little later the seasonings were gone and it was bland again. Any ideas why?
Oh, yeah this was supposed to be about the chicken. So, it turns out that you need more kitchen utensils than I thought to roast a chicken. I figured Chicken + pan+ oven = roasted chicken
WRONG
It turns out you need things like little spears to hold the chicken's rear end closed and kitchen string to pull the drumsticks together. Tooth picks failed as a substitute for the chicken-rear spears, but I decided I wasn't too worried about that, if I could find someway to hold the drumsticks close together.
So, it turns out that when you don't have a sewing machine and don't knit you have very little reason to keep anything resembling string in the house. I thought about finding some old clothes or something that I could cut into a long strip and use that, but it turns out that when we moved I really did get rid of all the old clothes I didn't like. So, I had to get a little more creative and use what we did have.
It turns out we have a lot of spiral bound notebooks. Between the two of us Jared and I spent about 10 years in college and neither of us are the kind of people to throw out our notebooks when the class is over. Usually it's only half full and we hate to waste the paper or something. I've started using those to give to Eliza when she wants to color. It fits well in the diaper bag and she's learning to turn the page when she fills up the one she's working on. If that doesn't work, she says "new page?" over and over and over and over until I come over and turn the page for here. She does that a lot. Repeat something until she gets my attention, that is.
Oh yeah, I was talking about the chicken.
So, we have these spiral bound notebooks, and Eliza has filled up a couple and they were about to be thrown out. So, I got a pair of needle nose pliers that had a wire cutter in them (thank you Dad and Liz for that incredibly useful Christmas present to Jared) and snipped off a piece of the wire, unwound it from the rest of the book and wrapped it around my chicken's ankles. I don't know if whatever metal that's made out of is poisonous, so we just avoided eating the chicken's ankles. It wasn't hard, there's not much meat on that part anyway.
So, if you look closely at this first picture, you'll see a bit of notebook wire at the top of the far ankle.
This is the picture I moved it too the plate. I read somewhere that if you put the chicken on a bed of onion slices before you cook it, it will keep the chicken from sticking to your pan and you get to have yummy onions with your meal. I love onions and I hate scrubbing pans so I figured this was totally a win-win. Sadly it was just a win. Not a win-lose, but just a win. The onions that the chicken was directly on were ok, but the rest of them were charred lumps of tuber-carbon. However, they didn't stick to the pan, and neither did my chicken, so it wasn't too bad.
Here's the plated chicken:
The gigantic slash you see across my chicken's chest is a sign of the killing curse. Or a sign that I don't have any type of kitchen thermometer and had to cut into the meat to tell if it was still pink inside. I guess I could have rotated the chicken before I took the picture, but that would have required forethought, and, as I mentioned, I am severely lacking in that area.
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