Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

Happy Belated Memorial Day, Everybody!

We didn't do much celebrating this past weekend (I honestly hadn't realized what weekend it was until, like, the day before), so for us Memorial Day was less about pools opening and BBQs heralding the beginning of summer than a reason for nice people at Brian's work to bring in huge tubs of potato and pasta salad for him to go home with. (And white wine, which is how we had all of the ingredients for the chicken picatta I wrote about earlier).

As it turns out, oven stuffer roaster chickens were on sale last week (buy one get one free), so I already had the perfect accompaniment to the salads he brought home. This chicken was a true group effort - Brian defrosted and cleaned the bird, then I stuffed and seasoned it. We then worked together to figure out how to cook it. We consulted Ina Garten's Perfect Roast Chicken recipe to help us with temperature and timing. Even though our chicken was a pound bigger than the recipe called for, cooking time ended up at 1:35 (which is pretty much Ina's directions). We weren't sure if that'd be the case though, so we had a few false starts with the time. Luckily, the chicken came out perfectly moist, despite the breast being cut in half from the one time I thought it was done, started cutting it, and realized it was still way too pink.

I'm glad we cut it before we tried to eat it!

As usual, we took some liberties with the seasoning - we added cayenne pepper, cumin, garlic powder, and replaced the thyme with rosemary because it's what we had in the house already. We also skipped the veggies on the bottom of the roasting pan because we already had side dishes ready to go.

Our big, beautiful roast bird!

Once the chicken was (really) done, Brian decided he wanted gravy. So we tried our hand at making gravy, something we'd never done before. This recipe suggested starting with 2 tablespoons of chicken droppings (the stuff at the bottom of the baking pan), adding two tablespoons of flour, and then adding back more droppings and enough chicken broth to make about two cups of gravy. The flour thickened really quickly at first and created a gelatinous paste, but it evened out when I wisked in the rest of the liquids. I'd never had chicken gravy before, only turkey, so I'm going to count this as a ***NEW FOOD ALERT***

        

From droppings to gravy in 7 minutes flat!

Putting it all together :)

It may have been a day late, but we brought together a great Memorial Day meal.
Happy Unofficial Start of Summer!