A blog by Cameron and Shannon

I didn’t originally set out to roast a chicken for this meal - I set out to make an Anthony Bourdain recipe of some sort. But let’s review: I’m a decidedly average (some may say “ridiculously unexperienced”) cook, while Bourdain is a 30-year veteran of French cuisine — and in his Les Halles cookbook, he isn’t about to cut you any slack. Ever. And he’ll call you impolite names every three pages. It’s rough.

Nevertheless, since I haven’t dropped the $35 necessary for his book yet, I googled “Bourdain recipe” and found Nick Kindelsperger’s entertaining Poulet Roti experience on The Paupered Chef (which, by the way, appears to be a real cooking blog, check it out). Hooray! A reasonably simple recipe with reasonably simple ingredients!

So, I set to it. Time to roast my first chicken!

Mise in place, sort of.

Note: This may not be the precise recipe from Bourdain’s book, as I used the secondhand recipe from the aforementioned Paupered Chef site. Seemed to work out well for me, anyway.

I decided to serve the chicken with a simple roast red onion recipe from Jamie Oliver, and my grandfather’s famous green salad. I’ll present the recipes separately, as not to confuse you (and me).

Poulet Roti

The Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken, about 4 lbs
• 1 lemon
• 1 onion
• 1 sprig fresh rosemary
• 1 sprig fresh thyme
• 5 tbsp butter
• 1.5 cups white wine
• A little chopped parsley

For completeness’ sake, I made sure to buy French wine - a Picpoul de Pinet by Coteaux de Languedoc (I had to Google all that to figure out which French words were the brand and which were the grape. I may still have gotten it wrong.) It turned out to be light and a little flat-tasting … but that may just be a characteristic of white wine in general — we usually drink red.

But I digress! Let’s get on with it. All the other ingredients are fairly straightforward. We made sure to buy a free-range chicken because I learned recently that caged chickens eat their own poop, and even pigs don’t do that. Ew.

The preparation

Cut the lemon in half and the onion in quarters. Ta-da! Vegetable prep is done.

Now for the chicken. Remove the giblets and rinse the bird. Unless, of course, your bird is mysteriously without giblets, which is what happened to me. Sigh.

Next, fuss at your wife for preheating the oven to 375 degrees, tell her to leave you alone you know what you’re doing just go watch TV or something, and then feel just slightly guilty because you did indeed forget to preheat first. Sigh.

Now in the official recipe, you’re supposed to truss the chicken here. Much like Kindelsperger, I didn’t have actual twine, so I used black thread and faked it. However, you should really buy some twine, google “how to truss chicken” if you need to, and do it now. Just make sure the bird is tied at some point.

Next, take a spoon and slide it under the skin above each breast (entering the bird from the cavity area). There will be a little clear membrane to break through. Once you’ve gently loosed the skin, slip a lump of butter and a sprig of thyme into each side. It’ll make your bird look uncomfortable, as you will see in the upcoming photo.

Then put a sprig of rosemary, 2 quarters of the onion, and both halves of the lemon inside the cavity. Feel free to quarter the lemon if you need more room - I barely managed to shove it in there.

Finally, take a couple tablespoons of butter, warm it in your hands, and really go to town. On the bird. Really get in every crevice. Feel free to feel awkward as you manhandle the poor bird’s nether regions. Then salt and pepper the whole thing like it’s going out of style (I hope you’re using cracked pepper and kosher salt, for your own sake).

Provided you didn’t get shafted on your giblets (how’s that for a turn of phrase), put them in the bottom of your roasting pan along with the rest of the onion. We also didn’t have a roasting pan — curses! — so I just put the bird in our dutch oven. It settled in nicely, but I’m sure there’s a reason for the roasting rack, so don’t follow my lead here.

Who’s free range NOW, huh?

The Roasting

Dump a half cup of wine in the pan and put your bird in the oven for 30 minutes.

Now, since Bourdain suggests basting the bird, Kindelsperger obsessively basted his every 5 minutes. From what Alton Brown (via uncomfortable fisheye close-ups) has taught me about oven heat, this probably isn’t the best idea, as your oven really won’t be able to maintain a good cooking temperature if you open it every 5 minutes. I basted the bird once at the 20 minute mark, because I didn’t want to deal with the possibility of bloody thigh.

While the bird roasted, I prepared my red onions — but let’s finish this recipe first.

After the 30 minute roast, cook for another 25 minutes at 450º. After it’s done, take the leftover liquid in the roasting pan, add a cup of wine, and reduce by half over medium-high heat. Then stir in a tablespoon of butter, thicken up and serve alongside your chicken with some parsley garnish. If you have giblets, this will probably become delicious … for me, the sauce just came out kind of winey. I probably didn’t reduce it enough, either, so make sure you do that.

Roasted. Yum! Except for that weird feathery flap by the rear. Sorry for pointing that out.

Roasted Red Onion with Thyme and Butter

from The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver

Remember those red onions in the first photo of this entry? No? Too many pages back? Okay. You’re going to need a few medium-sized red onions (I had 5 because they were sold by the bag). Cut them in 4, but don’t cut all the way to the bottom. Shove a pinch of salt and some chopped fresh thyme down in the middle of each, and top with a pat of butter and some more thyme.

Onions, pre-cooking, on comfy bed of rock salt.

Since I was trying a new chicken recipe, I didn’t want to put the onions in the same dish. Jamie suggested putting them on a bed of sea salt, which I did, but who knows if that made a difference. He gives a cooking time of 400º for 30-35 minutes, so I just put them in with my roast for the second phase of its cook time.

They came out looking fairly roasty. Yum!

Cooked onions, looking somewhat fatigued.

Bandad’s Salad

(My grandfather goes by Bandad. Blame 2-year-old me for that one.)

This is a green salad that I grew up with and love. It’s light and lemony, and the wiltedness somehow really works with the acidic nature of the dressing. Quick and easy: one paragraph should do it:

Rub a salad bowl with a cut clove of garlic. In a small bowl, mix together 1/4 cup salad oil, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp dry mustard, and 1/4 tsp paprika. Toss around 4 cups of greens (I recommend green leaf lettuce) in the bowl with that mixture, along with 2 tablespoons each of vinegar and lemon juice.

The Results

Dinner’s served!

Bon appetit!

I plated the onions and the chicken together in a dish in which I probably could have effectively roasted the bird … hindsight, and all that. I tried to make the gravy not look sad but it didn’t really work. At least the wine bottle looked cool.

Delectable, certainly.

Our consensus on the chicken? Delicious. The cook times are spot-on - as you can tell from the picture, the breasts were moist and luscious. (The red is where I carved through the bone.) You can really taste all of the aromatics in every bite. I was impressed. I bet it’s even better with giblet-enhanced gravy, or, you know, cooked by Anthony Bourdain.

Consensus on the onions: Good … in the middle. They were decidedly drier and crunchier than I expected, though knowing Jamie Oliver, that may be the way it’s supposed to roll. If you’re really into red onions, you should check this dish out. Neither of us could put away a whole onion … they were pretty big, though. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime with smaller onions and more butter.

And the salad was delicious, of course. Bandad knows his salads.

So, I seem to have satisfied the critics:

Mission accomplished.

… and we have a half of a delicious chicken just waiting for leftovers night. Huzzah!