Simple, Delicious Roasted Chicken

I have been wanting to try roasting a chicken for a while now. We buy the grocery store ones every now and then, which are very convenient and delicious, but they also have a lot of sodium in them. And sodium is not good for people that watch Notre Dame football, because enough heart palpitations are generated every Saturday as it is. Also, store bought things are somehow never as delicious as freshly made ones, though they are the easiest option sometimes.

The girl behind one of my favorite blogs seems to roast an awful lot of delicious looking chickens that make my mouth water. Last week, I made up my mind to roast one on Sunday…but by the time I made up my mind we realized it would be 10 pm before we would eat said chicken. So round 2 this week, and I must say it was a very good decision! This homemade guy was soooo much better than the store bought kind. I hate chicken skin, and I was stealing all of the skin from this one- it was just that good! I can’t wait to use the leftovers in sandwiches, salads, pasta, etc.

This is a great idea for a Sunday, because you will likely have extra that you can use during the week for lunches. It’s also really not that tough, just a little time consuming. But, if you are feeling up for a good, hearty, homemade Sunday dinner, I highly recommend this.

In the future I’ll play around with seasonings and stuffings, but I wanted to start out simple. And simple was pretty darn good.

Ingredients

• 1 whole roasting chicken (mine was between 5 and 6 pounds)
• salt
• pepper
• olive oil

Recipe

Clean off a countertop and clear of all other items. Put salt and pepper in one little bowl (at least a teaspoon of each, I used more) and olive oil in another (at least 2 T). Keep a few paper towels out too. This way you don’t have to use your dirty chicken hands to get these things later.

Preheat your oven to 425°Open up your chicken and remove the giblets from inside. I know there are things that you can do with these, but I am a newcomer to roasting chickenas and just discarded them. Pat the whole chicken dry with paper towels. Check it to see if there are any pieces of feathers left (yes, this sounds weird and scary, but I guess comforting to know that it was a normal chicken???). Pluck them out. Okay, now it stops being weird.

Rub salt and pepper all over the whole chicken. Then, rub olive oil all over it. Place it in a roasting pan (I just used an 8×8 glass dish) and bake it in the oven for 85-90 minutes. Put it on the middle or bottom rack so the skin doesn’t burn.

Let the chicken cool for a few minutes before you cut it. The skin will seem really hard and crunchy at first, but after it cools it settles down and gets super crisp and delicious.

Honey Hoisin Chicken and Mushrooms

Mmmm I just finished the last of these leftovers and they were delicious. A few months ago, I had made these. They were awesome, but I think I was more obsessed with the sauce than the meat. I’m more of a chicken person, so I wanted to try this out with chicken.

This recipe is super easy, you can prepare everything ahead of time, and it doesn’t take long to cook it. You end up with extra marinade after you take the chicken out; I saved it to toss with vegetables- and cook very, very well since there used to be raw chicken in it…

I didn’t know there was chicken in this soup!

Before I start my post, I wanted to say a big THANK YOU to Patricia at DeCamville Design for nominating me for the versatile blogger award! Check out the rest of her nominations- there are some great blogs on here. I was sooo excited to see this- Patricia made my day! I am going to work on my own list of nominations and hope to make someone else’s day

Sorry for a very long absence. We had a lot of family in town, and then took a semi-spontaneous trip to Brazil for a few weeks. So, I have been a very bad blogger lately. We’ve still been cooking a lot, I just haven’t been taking pictures/measuring anything. When my family came to visit, we made our first trip to the seafood market here and made the most amazing seafood feast out by the grill. I will try to recreate those recipes to share them on here sometime

We got back from Brazil last week and were still kind of in a food hangover. Simple food sounded good to both of us. When I was going to the store, Andrew asked me to buy some soup. I decided to try my hand at making it instead. So long sodium overload, BPA in the cans, etc. etc.

This is really easy to make. The only problem is the same one I have with all slow-cooking recipes: They smell so good and you have to wait sooo long before eating them. This can be made in a crockpot, but I chose to make mine in a Dutch oven (French oven? Are those the same thing?) so that I could brown the chicken first and keep everything in one dish. I made homemade noodles, but it would be good with regular noodles too.

With this soup I made homemade white sandwich bread which I will share on here too. It was a great, simple, wholesome meal. The recipe makes a ton, so I froze a lot of it in individual-ish portions to eat later on.

One more note- I only used 1.77 lbs of chicken. It was a package of 4 thighs. I added mushrooms, which are optional, so I cut down on the meat. It was definitely enough, but feel free to use more if you like it more meaty.