Recipe of the Week: Clueless Cook's Roast Chicken

A couple months ago I decided to teach myself how to cook. I gave myself a reasonable goal: one recipe a week, any recipe. This week I made roast chicken. When we were kids, my mother roasted a chicken every Sunday night: sizzly brown and crisp on the outside, juicy inside. My sister Amy and I would gnaw on the legs. This was in the early 80s, before supermarket rotisserie chickens were invented, which are good in theory but are usually cold and dried out by the time you eat them. I missed my mother’s chickens: plump and smelling up the whole house like homemade love.

not too shabby

I imagined roasting a chicken to be a fraught, complicated endeavor, one involving lifting up flaps of rubbery, puckery poultry skin to remove certain tiny organs and stuff other things inside. Raw chicken makes me queasy and fiddling with an entire dead bird seemed unsavory to say the least. 

I spent weeks trolling for a recipe, boycotting anything that used verbs like “basting” or “trussing” or required me to tie twine around knobby chicken ankles. No thanks—I know my limits. But I did want to cook rosemary potatoes around the roast—this was the way my mom did it, and it was the one dish I knew how to make before I started trying to cook. The recipe I found, in Parents’ magazine, sounded simple enough, with a jolly little emblem promising “It’s a snap!” 

Rosemary and Garlic Roast Chicken with Potatoes:

• 1  4- to 5-lb.  whole chicken
• 4  cloves  garlic, cut into slivers
• 3  to 4 sprigs  fresh rosemary
• 1  tsp.  olive oil
• 1/4  tsp. each  kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 8    tiny new red or gold potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
•   Salt

1. Heat oven to 400°F. Pat the chicken dry inside and out with paper towels. Remove giblet package, if present. Using a paring knife, make a few small cuts in the thickest part of the chicken legs and insert a garlic sliver into each. Being careful not to tear it, use your fingers to gently separate the skin from the breast meat; slide a few slivers of garlic under the skin. Place the remaining garlic and the rosemary sprigs in the chicken cavity. Rub olive oil all over the chicken and sprinkle with kosher salt and pepper. Place chicken in a roasting pan or heatproof baking dish.

2. Roast, uncovered, for 15 minutes. Add the potatoes to the pan or dish; sprinkle lightly with salt and toss to coat. Continue roasting for 15 minutes more. Stir potatoes. If chicken is browning to fast, cover loosely with foil. Roast another 30 to 40 minutes or until an instant-read thermometer registers 170°F. in the breast or 180°F. in the thigh and potatoes are tender, stirring potatoes once more during cooking.

3. Remove pan or dish from oven and let stand 10 minutes.

The first lesson I learned is not to go shopping at Whole Foods at 5:30 on a Sunday evening if you are planning to roast the chicken that very same night. You will not be dining until at least 8:30 P.M. And novices, don’t try to season a raw chicken while simultaneously fixing two small, hungry children their supper. 

While I put P. to bed, Steve beat me to the dirty work, patting the bird with paper towels and fishing out the tidy little bag of giblets. “Here’s the heart. Here’s the liver!” he announced as he tossed them into the snapping jaws of dogs. I got up my nerve and shoved some garlic into the cavity—slippery and a little ominous, like feeling around the garbage disposal to pluck out a spoon. But I was too lazy and squeamish to slice into the leg, so I scattered the remaining garlic slivers, along with the rosemary Steve picked from our winter herb garden, across the top of the bird instead.

Into the oven went the bird. Soon the whole house began to smell of herbs and chickeny goodness. When the buzzer rang, Steve jabbed his meat thermometer into one leg: 175—definitely done. "The juices are clear!" I practically shouted. I’d read somewhere that that was a good sign. Steve arched his eyebrows, like that was the strangest things he'd ever heard come from my mouth. 

The potatoes were soft but only just beginning to brown, whereas the chicken skin was sizzling and toasty cashew in color, just like Mom’s. I was so excited I forgot to let it rest, whatever that means, and Steve went after it with the carving knife before I could bask in my own glory.

But if the chicken looked pretty, it tasted even better: so juicy and moist, it was almost a caricature of itself. And hot—positively piping. No question, this bird was in a different league than rotisseries. I wished the potatoes were crispier, but I’m not sure how to get around that without overcooking the roast. Maybe next time, while the chicken is “resting,” I’ll crank up the oven to broil. 

We served it with a simple spinach salad—a staple at our house—and even after we both went back for seconds, we still had an entire Tupperware of leftovers to last all week. Yum.