I roasted my first whole chicken last Sunday. We’d gotten a whole chicken for $12 from Back Woods Farm, at our Saturday farmer’s market (I’m not sure of the poundage; I didn’t ask), and I decided that roasting it would make for some quick meals throughout the week. I’d done whole chickens before, but only in the crock pot. Doing a whole chicken in the crock pot is dead easy, but you have to be very careful not to over cook it, or you end up with mushy meat that doesn’t have as much flavor as you might want.

So, I consulted How To Cook Everything, and plopped the chicken breast side down into an 8×8 glass pan [1]. It went into the oven, which I set to 500 degrees. After 20 minutes, I mixed together a couple tablespoons of olive oil, and some thyme, salt, and pepper. I basted the chicken with some of the olive oil mixture and the flipped the chicken breast side up, and basted it again. After 8 minutes or so, it came out again and got basted again, and the oven tuned down to 325. At about an hour total time, I started pulling out the chicken about every ten minutes to see if the juices ran clear (I don’t have a meat thermometer, a lack I need to remedy.) The juices were clear at about 80 minutes, and a couple of pieces of chicken hacked out from the breast confirmed that it was done. (This is not the recommended way of checking meat doneness. Get a thermometer if you want to be sure. You want it to be 165 degrees F or so in the thickest part of the thigh.) Folks, this chicken was might tasty plain, and the next time I roast a chicken, I’m planning on eating part of it just like that, with mashed potatoes and gravy. But we had plans for this chicken. Over the course of the week, it:

- topped tossed salad
- went into chicken and potato pie
- went into chicken terriyaki
- went into chicken tacos (we also had beef tacos that night, from beef that I’d made up and frozen the other week; Jeff killed the rest of the beef taco mix with lunch today)

So, for a little over an hour’s work on Sunday, I had chicken pretty much ready to go for four meals. For the teriyaki and tacos, it just had to go into a pan with seasonings or sauce and get warmed up. $12 for a free range, happy chicken made four meals for two plus chicken bits to go into stock. I’d say that’s not a bad deal.

[1] If you’ve never done a whole bird before, check the neck end and the tail end and make sure that the neck and gizzards aren’t encased in a plastic bag inside the bird, particularly if your bird comes from a standard grocer and not a farmer. When we did Thanksgiving II in February, we checked the inside of the bird, but didn’t know to check the tail end as well. Luckily, it was a happy organic free range holy water blessed bird, and the organs were encased in paper, not plastic.

I did some cooking ahead today. I spent a fair bit of time in the kitchen (though, really, not as much as it might sound). I:

- made sandwich rolls for the week (the bread machine did most of the work)
- made banana muffins (minus the chocolate chips) for snacks and breakfasts (verdict: tasty)
- roasted a chicken (which went on tossed salad tonight, which will go in chicken pie tomorrow, and go in teriyaki chicken later on in the week, dramatically dropping the prep time on those latter two dinners)
- cut up vegetables (green peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and carrots) for tonight’s salad, and enough for side salads for several days

When I was putting away the leftovers, I went ahead and put together a salad for Jeff’s lunch and stowed a single muffin away in tupperware, also to put in his lunch. Tomorrow morning, all I’ll need to do is boil eggs for egg salad. It’s nice to have some of the work for the week already out of the way, even if roasting a chicken on a day when it hit 90 wasn’t the brightest idea in the world. Then again, tomorrow is supposed to be 97, so.

Sausage balls are a Southern staple at holidays and other occasions. They’re easy to make, and appeal to many favorite tastes: meat, cheese, and carbs. Most recipes you’ll find online call for Bisquick or other baking mixes, which we don’t keep around anymore, so I used our biscuit recipe as a base for our sausage balls.

- 1 pound bulk sausage, thawed
- 8 ounces of cheese (2 cups) (most recipes you’ll find online call for a higher cheese to meat ratio than this. This recipe is extremely flexible, but I found the balls to be plenty cheesy at 2 cups.)
- 2 cups flour
- 1 tbs sugar
- 3 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt

Mix everything together. This is a hand-mixing recipe; you’ll have to get in there and squish everything together. A mixing spoon, no matter how strong, isn’t going to cut it. Depending on the fat level in your sausage, the mixture may be a little dry. If that’s the case, add milk a little at a time, until you end up with a moist but not wet dough and everything is holding together pretty well. Form into balls - I aimed for about an inch - and bake in a preheated 400 degree oven for about 30 minutes. I got 34 out of the ingredients listed here (batch cost of $6.00).

Sausage balls freeze fantastically well; after they’re baked, let them cool then pack up in plastic ziplocs or tupperware. You can pull out a couple at a time for snacks and microwave for a minute or so, or pack 4 to 5 as part of a lunch. The batch will disappear before you realize it. :)

meatballs, gravy, potatoes

Meal: Meatballs, gravy, and mashed potatoes
Approximate cost: $6 for the batch of meatballs, about $2.50 total for dinner for us Monday night
Leftovers: some mashed potatoes and gravy (lunch the next day, quite tasty)
Local ingredients: beef, egg, milk
Organic ingredients: flour (for the bread which made the bread crumbs)
Active preparation time: under an hour

I really couldn’t tell you how long I spent making meatballs Monday morning. I haven’t been keeping up with this as well as I should (since one of the points of this blog is to keep track of how long it takes to prepare home-cooked meals.) The problem is that for me, cooking - especially when I’m fixing something in bulk to freeze, or going through some other repetitive task, like making tortillas - is a meditative act for me, keeping my hands busy and letting my mind wander (I can’t tell you how many school papers have worked themselves out in my head while I was in the kitchen) - and so sometimes, I lose track of time. I’ll try to do better.

My meatballs are, more or less, made from the recipe in How to Cook Everything. I took two pounds of ground beef out of the freezer to thaw Sunday morning, so it was ready to go by Monday. I toasted a slice of the challah we’d made over the weekend (verdict: very tasty. Nice for french toast) and chopped it into small bits, then put it in a mixing bowl and adding milk to cover. Once the milk was soaked in, I added the meat. To the meat, I added one egg, a teaspoon of garlic powder, a healthy dose of dried parsley, a touch of cinammon, a healthy amount of freshly ground black pepper, and a half a teaspoon salt. I mixed it all up with my hands until everything was well combined, and formed one inch meatballs (give or take a bit, of course). I got 46 balls out of 1.85 pounds of meat. They baked at 375 for 30 minutes. After they’d cooled off, I saved out 10 (5 each) for dinner, and the rest went into the freezer. I now have the hard part of three more dinners already made up and ready to go. The 10 that were being saved for dinner went into some Tupperware along with the pan drippings, and into the fridge.

When I got home from class, I tossed 4 medium potatoes into the microwave for 12 minutes. Meantime, I pulled out the meatballs and heated 2 tablespoons of the pan drippings, plus a little olive oil, in a small saucepan. When they were good and dissolved, I added 2 tablespoons flour, and mixed until I had a nice paste. Into that, I slowly added half a cup of chicken broth, and whisked it until there were no lumps. I added half a cup of milk slowly, then added a little more, whisking to prevent lumps. When the potatoes were done in the microwave, they got mashed with a little hot milk (about a quarter of a cup), and we had a hot, tasty dinner in under 15 minutes.

Last night, we made homemade cheese pizza. Nothing fancy, but tasty.