#11 Roast a Chicken

In my family, we don't really do roasted chicken. We do turkey and pork and beef roasts like other good WASPs, but for some reason we never did chicken.

Now last summer in England, I had the most awesomest weekend in Stratford-upon-Avon with some friends from school. We shared a roasted chicken between the four of us, and that generous bird (who we named Butch) just kept on giving - we ate him for dinner, then made delicious soup of him the next day.

Beautiful Butch and his one kidney. 

A real grown up dinner! 

Coming from a non-roast chicken household, I was so impressed with how useful this one little bird could be! Since I only ate Butch in Stratford and didn't actually cook him, this year I wanted to re-create the wonder of roasted chicken for my family at home.

To be honest, this time around it just wasn't as great. My mom knew I wanted to try roasting a chicken, so one day, she came home with two whole ones which were on sale at the No Frills grocery store.

But once the bird corpses were in my house, I realized that raw chicken really grosses me out - especially when it is whole and still resembles a bird. So I ended up making Mom do most of the work... like taking the guts out and all that gross stuff.

When it came time to put them in the pan, I didn't want to touch them or look at them - so it took me about ten minutes, with serving tongs in both hands, to actually get the gross naked carcasses into the pan. Then all I really did was turn on the oven, and throw some butter and herbs on top before proceeding to wash my hands and all surrounding surfaces about 20 times.

The resulting chickens. They were not special enough to name. 

So yeah, there they are. Meh. I mean, they tasted good enough, but nothing compares to Butch. Next time I want roasted chicken I think I'll just buy the pre-cooked rotisserie ones from the store. Muah muah.