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.