Roast Chicken and Chicken Stock

One of the things everyone should know how to do is roast a chicken. I am very sure that I am not an expert in the art of the roasted chicken, so I will just give a basic overview.

At our house, we play pretty fast and loose with measurements when it comes to food like this, and as my mom has said more than once, "If you don't like dinner, it's okay because we'll never have it again. If you do like dinner, sorry, but we'll never have it again."

I do not have pictures of the cooking process, sadly. Also, our secret weapon is a jar of bacon grease we keep in the fridge and add to whenever we cook bacon.

First, cut up your vegetables. Tonight we used turnips, beets, golden beets, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, cauliflower, and broccoli for the vegetables. Cut them up into pieces the right size for your dinner party (because of all the little people at our house, we go for pieces about dice-sized), and mix them up with some garlic and bacon fat and a little salt until they are covered. Put them into 9x13 baking pans (or anything large and high-sided suitable for the oven) and then get the chicken ready.

Chickens from the grocery store tend to come with a packet of giblets (the neck/heart/liver) inside, so you want to take those out and set them aside for making stock later. Then take two lemons and cut them in half, and put three of the halves inside the chicken's cavity (use the other half for your tea or water or something). Then get some more of the bacon fat in your hand, reach under the skin of the chicken, and massage the bacon fat into the muscles of the chicken. Do this until you start to feel a little silly about covering your hand in bacon fat and wearing a dead chicken like a puppet.

Pour a little bit of garlic salt into your hand and rub it under the skin just like you did the bacon fat, then rub some more on top of the skin.

The chicken can either go on top of the vegetables or in a separate dish. Then the chicken and the vegetables go in the oven at 475 for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, drop the temperature down to 400 and cook for about an hour, or when a thermometer put into the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F.

The heat and salt gets the skin crispy, and the lemon inside the chicken keeps it moist.

The next question, of course, is what to do with the chicken carcass. It's kind of silly to throw away a chicken carcass and buy chicken broth later on in the week for soups or something. We usually make broth with the leftovers, which means picking the carcass clean and putting the bones/skin/fat/everything not the meat into a stock pot (including the giblets you set aside earlier).

Then to the stock pot you add some onions, carrots, celery, and garlic. Add enough water to almost (but not quite) cover the bones, and cook on medium heat about two hours or so (breaking up the bones with a spatula occasionally) and let some of the water boil off. There's no real sign of doneness, just let it go until it looks like chicken broth should look.

Cooking might be chemistry (or alchemy, depending on who you ask) but it's not an exact science. Unless you're baking, it's important to trust your senses rather than the recipe. If you follow a recipe and it doesn't taste quite right, change things until it does!