Saturday, October 13, 2012

A bird in the oven


My friend Bruce (who hosted this weekends scary movie and sleep over extravaganza) gave me a few cook books to borrow that he thought I would like. One included "A bird in the oven and then some" by Mindy Fox - which gives 20 ways to roast a chicken, nice side recipes, and what to do with the chicken carcass so that the whole bird gets used to its best potential.


I adapted one of the recipes to fit the ingredients I had.
I used:
  • 1 whole chicken (5 pounds)
  • 1 lime
  • 1/2 cup raisins
  • 2 tablespoons unstalted butter, at room temperature
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 1/2 tsp saffron
  • 1 tsp freshly ground coriander
  • 1 tsp coarse black pepper
  • 1/2 tsp NuSalt
  • 1 cup white wine (I kept it classy with Charles Shaw)
1. Preheat oven to 350* roasting setting
2. Clean the chicken, remove giblets/ neck and set aside (I just froze mine for another day.) Dry well.
3. Place Chicken in a oven safe pot/ dutch oven.
4. In a seperate pot/ cup boil 1 cup of water, add in raisins and let soak.
5. Zest lime over chicken, and squeeze lime juice over chicken.


6. combine all spices, butter, and soaked raisins in a bowl.




7. Using your (clean) hands rub the spices/raisin mixture all over the chicken, including under the skin.  



8. Put chicken in oven and roast about 15 minutes.
9. After 15 minutes, pour ~ 1 cup white wine over the chicken, continue roasting for about 1.5 hours or until internal temperature is 165*F.


As a side I roasted up some mixed vegetables/ fruit including:
  • 1 potato
  • 1 onion
  • 1 red pepper
  • 1 red apple
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • olive oil
  • splash of white wine
  • Black pepper

No fancy or exciting prep, just chopped, put in a baking dish and roasted along with the chicken.

I also had a lot of weird looking carrots from the garden so I chopped those up and roasted them as well with just some olive oil, salt and pepper. 

Here are some of my weird garden carrots (with a cheery tomato for size comparison)



Looks like legs that have to pee!


Had a few 'baby' carrots in there
 


 
In the end I wound up just throwing all of the vegetables into the pot with the chicken and it made quite a good one pot wonder of a meal.



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