Roast Chicken
- 1 whole chicken
(4-5 lbs), with the giblets and neck removed*
- salt
- 4 tbsp. butter
- 2 tbsp. olive oil
- 2 medium onions, sliced into eighths
- 4 carrots, sliced into half inch sections
- 4 potatoes, sliced into bite-sized sections
- 4 cloves of
garlic, whole
- 1/4 c. fresh
parsley
Preheat the oven to 425
F. Sprinkle the chicken inside and out with salt. Rub on
butter. Melt remaining butter and mix with olive oil for
basting.
Place the chicken, breast up, on a wire rack in a pan. Put the
veggies in the pan. Brown for 5 minutes on breast, baste with
butter and oil mixture, turn and brown for 5 minutes on the left side,
baste, then turn and brown for 5 minutes on the right side.
Baste the bird and leave it on the right side. Reduce the heat to
350 F and cook for 30 minutes, basting every 10 minutes. (Once
you run out of olive oil and butter, start basting it with the juices
in the bottom of the pan.)
Turn to the other side and baste every 10 minutes for 30-40
minutes.
Turn breast up and cook for 15 minutes or until the juices in the
thickest part of the drumstick run clear yellow.
(Don't forget to save the giblets and bones to turn into chicken
broth! Just stew in a lot of water with carrots, onions, garlic,
and parsley for a few hours, then strain off the juices. I freeze
the broth in pint containers for use in other recipes.)
Serves 4-5 as a main course.
* We often find fancy Amish chickens
right before their expiration date for as cheap as $1 per bird in the
grocery store. Then we buy all they have and freeze them until we
want them. I take them out the day before we want them to thaw in
the fridge.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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