Roasted Chicken

Roasted Chicken...this falls into the same category as pizza dough...the "staple" and "Something I must master."

I can give you a brief history of me and pizza dough. It was probably 1997-1998. I was trying to master homemade pizza dough. I tried about five times...water too hot, water too cold...many times of a burned and/or sticky mess, ending 45 mins later with a phone call to Rusty's pizza.

Then, one day, I got it. And I never made it again...I immediately started using the bread machine for the dough.

So Roasted Chicken. I am not much of a meat person. We eat a lot of vegetarian and more vegan meals now. But once a year my husband attempts to roast a turkey. And our results are spotty at best (the best years were the first year of brining, and the year my mother-in-law was in town and we used a bag). My one or two attempts to roast a chicken resulted in burned on the outside, raw on the inside (not fully defrosted...)

This weekend, I noticed a sale at Ralph's, $0.59/lb for whole chicken. So I revamped my dinner plans and bought two chickens for $5.31. I found a recipe on http://www.allrecipes.com/ for Roast Sticky Chicken. I omitted the marinating time, and cooked the two chickens at 325F for 2 hours instead of 250F for 5 hours.

Yum. The breast meat was a little dry because we put them back in the oven for another 15 mins. But otherwise delicious.

So, lesson learned. Don't waste effort trying to perfectly time the defrosting of the bird in the fridge (who has room for that anyway?) Just cook the bird fresh.

So that's what we're going to do for Thanksgiving. Get a fresh bird.

(I am aware that this isn't the most frugal thing...many a frugal person has written about the "turkey trot" done to fill their freezers with cheap turkeys for the year. But that's just too much work, we don't eat that much meat, and I'm only feeding a small family of three.)