While I’ve been a chicken-eater for over 10 years now, having never been around people who cooked it, I’ve mainly just eaten chicken when dining out. Sure, I’ve cooked a few boneless, skinless, chicken breasts and added a chicken sausage to this or that, but I never really felt I was cooking an animal. Since I have a few birds without feathers on my meat checklist and you don’t always find goose, squab, or pheasant on the menu, it may be up to me to make those flighty friends on my own. Also, in the quest for the best meat treats, there’s a lot of eating out on the agenda for the year, and I need to cut costs somewhere.

So, to start out I decided I’d roast my first whole chicken. I got a free-range, antibiotic-free bird at the market and read up on how to cook birds. I decided to combine the advice of Alice Water’s The Art of Simple Food
and the spice of Bon Appetit to flavor the fowl. First step was to take it out and salt and pepper it.

It is hard for me to handle a whole chicken without thinking of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” Video, but I duly resisted making the bird pretend-sing-and-dance. Now remember when I said birds without feathers? Well, one “bonus” feature of this hippie bird was that it still had some feathers attached to its bottom area. I was steeling up for shoving my hands in its inner cavity and rubbing some salt all up in its insides, but I had to take a step away after seeing its naughty region still a-feathered. This was the moment of peak grossed-out. But I grabbed my chefs knife and just sliced those parts off and threw ’em away.

After that it all seemed pretty easy — even separating the skin to gently wedge oil and fresh spices in there.  I realized towards the end I had no string for trussing, so I used the extra sprigs of rosemary from my garden to tie the legs and wings as instructed. Then it was into the oven, and after a few turns, bastes, and a little more than an hour, the chicken you see above came out. Perhaps presciently, I had asked for a meat thermometer on my wedding registry, so I just waited for it to read 175 and declared it done.

And thanks to Water’s tips I believe, it was delish. The gravy I made had a few lumps, but the husband agreed my dish ruled the roost.