A few days ago a close friend came over to watch a couple episodes of True Blood. She gave me the first season as a birthday present, but we’ve had a hard time finding the time to get together to watch it together. I thought I might sweeten the deal by linking supper to the show thematically. She lives in a vegetarian household, but is not herself a vegetarian. The show involves a lot of biting of living things and discussions of dead things, so I thought I’d offer meat so we could get into the feeling of the show. (Sensitive vegetarians might want to skip to the recipe for a salad dressing/marinade toward the end).
I kind of pictured rare steaks and tearing the meat off of ribs (more werewolf than vampire I suppose) but as it turns out our first attempt at this wasn’t particularly bloody. I picked up a small chicken at Fernando, my favorite poultry place and decided to try going all Julia Child on it (the roast chicken coming out of the oven in Julie & Julia is one of my clearest memories of the film). As it happens, I was a little recipe following challenged and completely messed up the technique which involves lashings of butter and frequent turning of the chicken. I salted too early, forgot to flip the bird onto its back and had the initial temperature all wrong. Luckily, roast chicken is a pretty easy thing to do, and thanks to the butter and the quality of the bird, it turned out golden and wildly tender. It wasn’t quite the crackley, golden wonder from the movie, but that one was likely created with a blowtorch. We consumed it off brightly coloured TV dinner styled plates with mashed potatoes, crappy iceberg lettuce and store-bought dressing salad and a simple gravy (Julia’s chicken gravy involves skimming the fat and then whisking in more butter. I wasn’t sure about the whole – taking the fat out, to then add more in thing, so just skimmed the fat and then mashed the carrots and onions into the juices to thicken it).
It was tasty and satisfying, but I’ll have to have a go at the Julia style chicken on a day where I can follow directions. Since I can’t really reliably give you any feedback on the Julia chicken, besides to say that rubbing butter all over the chicken before roasting doesn’t do any harm, I’ll provide you with a recipe for my favorite way to make roast chicken. The one drawback is you can’t make old style gravy (with flour in the pan) because the juices are too salty, but the chicken itself tastes amazing.
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Roast Chicken
As I may have mentioned before, I was raised in a vegetarian household and so cooking entire animals has been a skill I’ve acquired later in my cooking life. It turns out that roast chicken is super easy and since people don’t do it much anymore, usually impressive for those in attendance (until you start carving that is).
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees*
Marinade**
1/8 cup olive oil
1/2 clove of garlic crushed and chopped
Juice from 1/2 lemon
1 tbs soy sauce or tamari
Combine all the ingredients in a small bowl and whisk together until the different ingredients combine. Taste for salt and lemon adjust to your own taste. The salty/sourness of the marinade should be balanced. 1.5 Kg Chicken (the quality of the bird totally makes a difference. Most grocery store chicken does not, in my opinion, cook well, or sit well on the conscience)
Wash the chicken in cold water inside and out and then pat dry. Remove anything that’s been left inside the chicken (I felt I’d kind of come of age, meat wise, the first time I did that) and remove the neck if it’s still attached(I use kitchen scissors, but a truly sharp knife will likely work too). Sprinkle the inside cavity with a little salt and put the other half of the lemon you just squeezed into the cavity ( I have never noticed this to have any discernable effect, but I like doing it anyway. If you have random fresh herbs like parsley or thyme or sage kicking around put those in too).

a dish almost exactly like this one was the only thing that survived a house fire my mother and I were in when I was four.
If you are preparing the chicken well in advance of when you will be roasting it you can marinate the chicken. If like me, you don’t generally plan ahead that much, find a small oven proof pan to put the chicken in. Most roasting pans I’ve seen are far too big for a small chicken, so I just use a square corningware dish I have. Rough chop an onion and a carrot and put that in the pan (OK I stole this from Julia; it was nice). Put the chicken in the pan breast side (the puffy side) down and pour a good amount of the marinade over the chicken. Rub it in a bit. Put the chicken in the oven and after 20 minutes or so take it out and flip the chicken breast side up. Baste the chicken with the marinade and the pan juices. Cook for another 7 or 8 minutes until the breast starts to brown. Baste one more time and turn the oven down to 325.
The chicken is done when the juices (which will come out if you pierce the skin) run clear. If that’s too vague a sign for you, then poke the chicken in a couple of places with a meat thermometer. When it reads 160 degrees to 165 degrees the chicken is probably done (30-45 minutes).
Move the chicken to a large plate and let it rest for 5-10 minutes (you can tent it with foil or paper if you have a drafty kitchen). As I mentioned earlier, the marinade makes a traditional flour gravy kind of weird, so instead, push the vegetables to the side of the pan and tip the juices so the fat rises to the top. Skim as much of the chicken fat as you can off of the surface. Take a potato masher and mash the carrot and the onion into the gravy. If there’s lots of browned bits in the pan, you can heat the pan up over a burner and deglaze with a bit of lemon. Adjust lemon and salt to taste.
Once you’ve carved the chicken up (sorry no tips for you here, I’m terrible at this) pour a little of the gravy over it. I happen to like it on potatoes too, but that might just be me.
* The roasting technique here comes from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. The down side is that the extreme heat at the beginning of the cooking can sometimes create a bit of a smoking issue in your oven (and a fire alarm problem when you open the oven to baste and flip the bird). I have a suspicion that the vegetables in the pan might mitigate this a bit. Also, Bittman suggests cooking the chicken on a v-rack. I have not ever found a small enough v-rack, for this to make sense, but if you have one, it keeps the skin on the bottom of the chicken from getting soggy. If all the flipping and basting seems like too much work, then just do what Nigella does and toss it in the oven at 450 for about an hour and fifteen minutes breast side up and then let it rest for 10-15 minutes.
** If any vegetarians have made it this far, the marinade/salad dressing is great on baked potatoes and tossed with baked tofu or just about anything really. It’s salty, sour and savoury all at the same time.