One of my favorite Sunday meals is a roasted chicken. It’s easy to throw one in the oven and then two hours later, have a delicious meal and leftovers for all week!
I decided to check out Betty’s instructions for a roasted chicken. Thankfully, her instructions were beautifully simple and outdated. When’s the last time you had to remove pin feathers and cut off your chicken’s head? It also recommends that if your bird gets too brown too quickly, you can take pieces of cloth coated in fat and place them on top of your bird. That sounds like a fire hazard to me, and I find aluminum foil will typically do the same job!
The other directions were to simply salt the inside cavity, stuff the bird, rub her with unsalted fat and cook her breast side down for the first 3/4ths of the cooking time, then flip her to brown the breast. My chicken was a five pounder, so Betty said to cook her 2.5-3 hours at 325 degrees.
I used coconut oil as my fat. I’ve been trying to incorporate coconut oil in my diet more, I’ve heard that it’s healthier and it has a high smoke point. Stuffing inside the bird freaks me out a little bit, so I opted to keep my stuffing on the outside. I also like to use sage and thyme with chicken, so I sprinkled some on the outside and inside the cavity of the bird.
I decided if I’m going to cook according to 1950s standards, I was going to have to cook the giblets. I’ve been eating giblets my entire life, but I have always been a little squeamish about cutting them up and actually thinking about what I am eating. My dad normally puts them in stuffing for he and myself for any holiday where we have a bird. I normally use mine when I make broth – I wrap them and my carcasses in cheesecloth and let them boil away. Betty’s method for cooking giblets is to boil them for 1 to 2 hours, which seems ridiculous! I called my dad and asked him how he prepared them, because I realized I never actually watched him do it – he cuts them up and browns them in a skillet, so I used his method.
I had a box of Stove Top stuffing that I got for free from a Tops meal deal. I normally prefer a rice stuffing – I’ll make a proper rice stuffing one of these days. I don’t really like Stove Top (or most prepared box foods – they’re typically too salty for my tastes). For this, I opted to mix some rice with the box of Stove Top to get rid of some of the saltiness, and add the giblets into that.
I also made some roasted sweet potatoes – tossed them in a little melted butter, sage, thyme and some red pepper flakes and threw them in the oven towards the end of the bird cooking time. Betty’s recipes for Sweet Potatoes are as follows: Baked Candied Sweet Potatoes, Skillet Candied Sweet Potatoes, Sweet Potato Apples (where you shape sweet potatoes around a marshmallow so it looks like an apple), and Banana Meringue Sweet Potato Puffs. I love sweet potatoes, but the thought of eating them with marshmallows or corn syrup is disgusting to me. I opted to stick to my normal methods.
The chicken turned out good. I think cooking it upside down kept it rather moist; however, the skin didn’t get very crispy, even after I turned it right side up. This wasn’t too much of an issue for me, but it doesn’t look as pretty. If you’re going to be serving this to a group and wanting to have crispy brown skin, you might want to stick it under the broiler for a bit to crisp up the skin.
Angela by Day, Betty by Night 