Mid-Century Cooking

This is a reconstructed recipe, that we remember Dottie making.  Here are the general ingredients- next is specifically what I (Karen) used this time!

1 Roasting Chicken (3-4 lbs)
Butter (softened) 6 T
Lemon or apple for the cavity
Vegetables for Roasting.
Spices.

It’s almost a clean-out-the-vegetable drawer chicken- almost as easy as supermarket rotisserie chicken, and tastes even better.  It takes about 10-15 minutes to assemble (depending on how much vegetable peeling and chopping is involved) – and that’s all the work it needs!!

Here’s the chicken!

For the spices this time I used:
2 T paprika
1 T onion powder
2 T garlic powder
1 t black pepper
1 t salt
1 t crushed red pepper flakes
1 t dried basil
1/2 teaspoon dried marjoram

1.  Mix this together.  Add half of the spice mix to 3 T of the softened butter.
2. Unwrap the roasting chicken.  Remove the giblets, etc from the cavity.  Discard or set aside for later use.
3. Use your fingers or the back of a large spoon to dissect the skin off the the breast meat as far as it elevates easily.  Spread the softened-butter and spice mix between the skin and the meat.
4. Put a lemon halved or an apple sliced into the cavity and tie the legs together.
5. Melt the other 3 T of butter and stir in the rest of the spice mix.  It makes a pretty thick paste.  Use a brush to spread this generously over the check.
6. Set the chicken on a rack in a roasting pan.  You can cook it without a rack, but the rack lets the juices drain away as it cooks, keeping the chicken crisper.
7. Spread all the vegetables on the bottom of the pan.  I used sliced sweet potato, quartered onions, a few carrot chunks, and a lot of tiny new potatoes (about grape-sized). You could add corn, any root vegetable, just about anything.
8. Put it in the oven at 275 degrees F.  The vegetables look very dry.  You’ll be tempted to drizzle them with olive oil or something-  but restrain yourself.  They don’t need it!
9. At 275 degrees, this takes about 2 hours to cook.  It is done when an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thigh or thick part of the breast reads at least 165 degrees F.  Cooking it longer in a slow oven like this makes it and the vegetables really tender.  If you are in a hurry, you can cook it at a higher temp (350-375 for about an hour)-  but you’ll be sacrificing some deliciousness.
10. When you remove it from the over, tilt the chicken over so any butter remaining in the cavity drains to the bottom of the roasting pan.  Stir the vegetables around in the drippings and serve!