Christmas Chicken

Sweet....you could actually just rub plain butter all over the outside (make sure you get into all the nooks and crannies), stuff the cavity with some fresh thyme, rosemary and garlic, and roast at a fairly high heat. Rubbing the butter on the outside helps brown the skin, and gives tons of flavour. Putting the herbs and garlic inside the chicken will scent the whole bird. For extra flavour, you can cut up some onions, carrots and celery, and roast the chicken on top of those. The chicken may need a couple of bastings while cooking. Also, don't cook it too long. A 3-3 1/2 lb. chicken roasted at 425 shouldn't take more than about 45 minutes to an hour, but you cook it to your desired doneness. Good luck!

we like a recipe that we got from a Julia Child book. After cleaning the bird well , add your flavorings to the cavity)

Take a shallow baking pan and add a cup of a good broth and a cupof a fruit juice and an onion.
Turn oven to 475 and place the bird on its side.Place it in the oven and begin. Cook the bird at 10 min per pound. Turn the chicken onto its other side when half the time has elapsed and finish

For eg, if you have a 5 lb roaster you cook it 50 min total, with 25 min on one side then 25 min on the other. The skin is crisped and the meat is super moist and , most important, the breast is NOT dry,
Fruit juice is youre choice, we like orange or apple cider

Good idea, FM . . . my sweetie adds fruit juice to the pan when roasting pork or beef, and it is always tender and moist (i'll bet the acid in the fruit juice helps to tenderize the meat). She also came up with a wonderful little meal for the two of us once. She took some stuffing mix, the cornbread variety, and substituted orange juice for some of the liquid, and baked catfish bedded on the stuffing . . .

Now i'm makin' myself hungry . . .

Thanks, boy.

murphyz - have you thought about sides? depending on how much time/energy you want to put into it, there are a lot of easy, Christmassy sides you can have with that chicken. BTW - the way you're planning to prepare it sounds very good.

farmerman....thanks for including the turning thingy. That's usually how I do my birds, one side, the other side, then finish on it's back, but I forgot to pop that into my post. Same method works great for ducks too.

ehBeth,

No, I haven't really given much thought to it yet. Any suggestions are more than welcome though.

Mxx

murphyz - I'm not sure if this is just a North American thing, but I find cranberries somewhere in the meal MAKE it Christmassy for me.

I'm also a fan of, hmmm, I think it's called flavour layering. That is, repeating the same flavours through the meal.

So if I was preparing a roasted chicken with butter and herbs, I'd use the same herbs in a dressing to be prepared on the side. I'd also toss some dried cranberries in the dressing, and into the salad I'd also be serving. If I was serving green beans as one of my veggies (I love to have lots of types of veggies at Christmas) - I'd probably use butter and almonds on them - and fling a few slivered almonds into the salad. It's sort of an old trend, but I like the familiar flavours running through a meal.

What are your favourite veggies? Maybe consider making 1 or 2 of them in a familiar way, and 1 or 2 of them in a new way? Make parts of the meal safe and familiar, and parts special and festive. That would definitely give a Christmassy feeling to your meal.

Because I'm only cooking for myself I wasn't going to go to a whole lot of bother, but also have the luxury of being able to experiment with new things that no one else has to eat.

Roast potato will be boiled in a chicken stock and then roasted alongside the chicken - I could probably use the same herbs over these as is used for the chicken.

The only veggies I was planning on having would be peas, sweetcorn and carrots.

I was considering making a stuffing that consisted of cornbread, onion, mushroom, garlic and pesto.

Alas, I am not a huge fan of cranberry.

Mxx

Set, yeh the acid and enzymes make it tender. Ive been told NEVER use grapefruit juice cause the enzymes are so strong that the meat will be almost too tender. Hardly seems possible.

Sides are very important to our meals

We usually select some of the more southern style sides like
Crowder peas-a tradition during the solstice, cooked in a soppin sauce of hamhocks and tiny bits of onion,
They are marvelous with a great big hunk of hot buttered corn bread

Greens (this is an all encompassing term that refers to any peppery savory leafy plant that usually bears no fruit and is eaten just for its green peppery flavor) eg Creasy greens, and collards. Similarly cooked in a hamhock broth , usually started the day before and given 2 , 3 hour cookings. Served with a ground peppery cheesey sprinkle using something like Asiago cheese (highly untraditional but it really works nicely together)

Sweet potato pudding. Ends of the sweet potatoes are cut off and the skin is cleaned. Then bake until the potatos are really darkened on the outside and break them into a dish with a little fried onion and bacon mix. the potatoes should not be mushed into a
vomer but left a little chunky so the onion and bacon can find little spots to just sit and add flavor. sprinkle with a little parmeson and bake till the cheese melts a bit .

chow chow/pickalilly
This is hard to describe but its a sweet and sour mixture of all sorts of veggies and beans. Its a cold dish with a vinegary swet liquid and it makes you glad youve got some. if anyone is interested , Ill find the recipe because its best made in the summer and canned and eaten in the winter as a side dish with a hot supper in a driving snowstorm.


Mincemeat Pie- with rum ice cream.

Our neighbors (not the Amish ones) are having lasagne for Christmas, im sorry but I cant see that.

this sounds really interesting. but what the heck is a vomer?

Its a line from Dave Barry-Where he tried to describe a frog. He said A frog, as everyone knows has vomerine teeth (this enables them to grind their food into a vomer) Sort of just a line that makes me smile . I go around smiling alot so people leave me alone alot

sheesh. and i thought it was some kind of pennsylvania gap appliance!

Threads like this make me hungry. Yummy :-D

This thread was on my mind when I went out to pick up some groceries. So, tonight I fried up a bitta bacon, and then some fish. Made some dressing with cranberries, and a bitta salad. It was a great meal.

and the dogs loved the bacon-fried fish ...