Since everyone just made New Year's Resolutions and is constantly posting about their progress on Facebook (good job - you joined a gym!) I'm going to share a progress update from MY mini-bucket list for the year, which I kicked off on my birthday back in October.
One of the items was to roast a whole chicken. I know, especially for someone who cooks as much (and I'd like to think as well) as I do, roasting a bird should be old hat. Yet despite the fact that I routinely make roasts, when I made my list I had never dealt with an entire bird.
Two reasons: CAVITY and GIBLETS.
Just thinking about a chicken's "cavity" reminds me of the metaphor Chris Farley trotted out in Tommy Boy: I can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking my head up a bull's ass, but I'd rather take a butcher's word for it.
You understand now, right?
Something about watching my hand disappear into a chicken, unsure if "giblets" await, makes me a bit queasy. Maybe I'd be more comfortable with a turkey, where I could open that sucker up and get a good look before losing my elbow to it?
And the word GIBLETS? That just implies that you aren't even dealing with real anatomical parts - it's more like a bag of mystery parts that have no real anatomical names. As in: This grab-bag contains one ovary, half a liver, four inches of intestines, a spleen-ish looking item and what might be a fallopian tube.
Now that I think about it, maybe I'm scarred from the Thanksgiving when I was in college and the house of guys living next door to us invited my roommates and me over for dinner. The meal itself was great, but I still remember opening our back door that morning to find what we thought was a severed penis on our stoop. (It was during the height of Lorena Bobbitt and in my defense, none of us knew what a turkey neck looked like.)
In any case, I bit the bullet and decided to make a chicken for our New Year's Eve dinner this year. I thought it would be nice to ring in the year with one more item crossed off my bucket list. As it turns out, I got lucky with the bird - it was organic and the giblets were already removed so the cavity was as clean and smooth and vacant as the Capitol Rotunda on Christmas Day.
That hurdle crossed, I got to the fun part: seasoning the bird. The Thanksgiving turkey that my friend Lisa had made was so addictive that I decided to take a page from her book and prep my chicken with bacon butter.
Here's the recipe if you want to make chicken that's like crack. In a food processor, combine until it's a smooth paste:
- Fresh thyme
- Fresh rosemary
- Fresh sage
- 3 cloves of garlic
- Cooked bacon (I used six strips of center-cut)
- 3 T. Butter (room temp)
Anywhere I could work the skin loose, I slid in a thin layer of this butter. Then I rubbed the entire outside with it before salting and peppering. I stuck half a lemon and a whole bulb of garlic in the (once-scary but now benign) cavity, then criss-crossed the legs and tied them in place like a proper lady to make sure nothing slid out during the roasting. Then I stuck the whole thing on a roasting rack on top of sliced onions.
While it was cooking, I made myself a toasted roll - and spread it with bacon butter. Then I made mashed potatoes - and added some bacon butter. And when it came time to sauté the green beans? You guessed it.
Basically, the entire meal was an ode to bacon butter.
I wish I would've taken a photo of the final result for this post because it did Norman Rockwell proud. I mean, that bird was golden and glowing and tasted as fantastic as it looked. I just can't believe it took me almost half a lifetime to attempt it.
Now if only I can find a restaurant that makes bacon butter sushi...
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