In the Kitchen...

FAST FREE WEEK means meat!!! At least for my hubby and my oldest. So in honor of Fast Free Wednesday I roasted chickens. Most women I know aren't really big on purchasing and cooking a full chicken. I remember when I was first married I had never purchased a whole chicken. I didn't know the first thing to do with it. While I had cooked chicken lots of times and lots of ways, I had just never dealt with a whole bird before. In fact on our first Thanksgiving I got up at o'dark thirty to deal with our lovely turkey, only to have to go wake up hubby to ask him which part was the breast. Leave it to a man to know the breast! Ha! Ha! So my wonderful hubby put Ms. Bird on his hand and used it as a puppet to enlighten me on the anatomy of the naked bird. I must say I felt pretty dumb, but I was able to get it cooked and it was delicious, even if I do say so myself!

Anyway, back to the chickens. Roasting a chicken is the easiest thing in the world and if you're not so savy in the kitchen you can look like you are!! The other great thing about roasting chicken is that if you do two at a time, like I do you can have precooked meat for a couple of meals during that week. Usually I would prepare the chickens on a Sunday morning and set the timer on the oven and we'd have a lovely Sunday chicken dinner. Then I would have chicken for enchiladas and chicken salad for later in the week. If I was really ambitious I would also cook the bones Sunday evening and we'd have home made chicken soup for lunch the next day. So we would get three good meals out of one day of work. Throwing the stuff together for the future meals is a snap when the meat is already cooked.

For my roast chicken I wash the bird and pat it dry and place it in a sprayed pan. I then stuff the bird with lemon and/or onions and fresh herbs if I have them on hand. Then I sprinkle some seasonings on the skin and bake in a low oven (225 degrees) for 4 hours or so. If I want a complete meal I season some carrots and potatoes and place around the chicken and roast them all together. Many a new mom has received this meal after giving birth and they have loved it. So if you haven't roasted a chicken, give it a go. Nothing could be easier!!

As a side note I was able to finish my first COMPLETE quilt. I've been working on all these quilt tops and then trying to get them quilted since the beginning of the year. Now I'm able to start binding them and seeing the completed fruits of my labor. I think it came out pretty nice.



Enjoy your day!!