how to finish a chicken...

[iAmBaronVonTito]

olive oil (and any of its variations) is probably my favorite oil to cook with.  in fact, i no longer use butter and ive never used PAM. 

salt, pepper, and garlic are sure staples in just about everything i cook.  on most, but not all, occasions i throw in a hot spice- peppers, etc.  not to mention, unless its last-minute, im in a hurry, or its impossible/expensive to get fresh, i never used dried spice.  i feel much better about the food i cook when im able to log the miles for making it from scratch. 

i notice some FOT can appreciate this as well.  i love getting recipes/ideas from this board.

[erika]

You shouldn't give up butter! It's so good and it gives a great crisp to certain foods. Ever try mixing olive oil and butter in equal parts? It's great for sauteing. You should also pick up some cumin -- it's my favorite spice. Nice and nutty.

[iAmBaronVonTito]

i have a love/hate relationship with cumin.  and i always find a way to add cilnatro (post-cooking).

lately, ive been playing with different ways to use lime or lemon to add acidity.  when im done, i throw the citrus scraps in the garbage disposal and flip the switch- now my garbage disposal smells great.

[franks.]

A good thing with lemon is that you can also use it to cut down on spice if you over spice something. Maybe that's common knowledge, but I've bailed myself out a few times with that trick.

Right now with citrus in season, I like to use blood oranges on a salad. Red onion, lettuce, some orange slices, and just an oil and vinegar dressing does the trick.

[iAmBaronVonTito]

something tells me ive heard this before about the lemon > spices trick.  something tells me ive heard it was a myth as well.  theres a great chance im wrong on both accounts.

under normal circumstances, i despise fruit with my greens and im not a vinegar dressing fan, but that salad sounds delicious.

[Martin]

I like to take a whole head of garlic, whack off just a little of the top of it (not where the bulbs are held together at the stem, but at the top) so you reveal part of the cloves.

Stuff that into your chicken's butt.

Rub the bird with a little olive oil and another sliced garlic clove. Then sprinkle salt, pepper and a little cumin on it. When you're done roasting the bird you get yummy roasted garlic cloves to eat along with it! Yay.

At least two thirds of this post sound like pure filth.

[erika]

Yay!

[franks.]

something tells me ive heard this before about the lemon > spices trick.  something tells me ive heard it was a myth as well.  theres a great chance im wrong on both accounts.

under normal circumstances, i despise fruit with my greens and im not a vinegar dressing fan, but that salad sounds delicious.

Thanks! It's kind of a refreshing treat during the winter.

And, well, the lemon doesn't technically remove the spice, but what it does is it adds some acidity and reduces the flavor of the spice, so it's not as spicy to your taster or to your stomach.

I worked in a hippie restaurant when I was around 18 or 19 and one of my jobs was to make hummus. One of the ingredients we used was cayenne. I confused tablespoons for teaspoons and made some hummus that woulda made a cajun spew puke through his nose. My boss fixed it by adding lemon. I've returned to this trick many times since.

[Sarah]

I bet the people who ate it still had very sore bottoms later on.

[dave from knoxville]

I don't follow. Whole chickens are one of the cheapest and healthiest ways to eat meat.

Exactly, you can get a whole chicken for 99 cents a pound versus cut up pieces that cost three, four times that much. And If you choose to roast the chickens whole, you can make soup out of the carcasses, getting another meal out of them.

And then you can set the bones in the sun for two months, bleaching them out, then grind them down with a mortar and pestle into a dust that you can insert into corn cob doll replicas of your enemies and curse them by burning them over an open flame manure pit. Later, in the morning, if there's anything left, you can smoke that and see visions of your elders passed on to the other side.

At least that's how I remember it working. I live in the big city now.

[Sarah]

Interesting.  More details about what the curse entails, please.  This may come in handy.

[Sarah]

All this chicken talk made me hungry for some, so I dug out the roaster I knew was hiding in my freezer, only to discover that it is freezer burned.  I'm going to marinate the hell out of it in yogurt and curry spices and then curry it up so more when I cook it.  With any luck, it will be ediblish. 

I feel very guilty.

[erika]

Did it come out ok? Surely the breast meat must have been somewhat salvageable...

I just put a teeny little chicken in the oven slathered in a butter with fresh garlic, salt and pepper. I put a halved lemon in the cavity and I splurged on baby potatoes that I'm roasting with more garlic (this time in olive oil) and some dill.

[franks.]

I bet the people who ate it still had very sore bottoms later on.

Yeah, proud moments.

Good luck with your chicken!

[Sarah]

The chicken is still marinating.  I'll bake it tomorrow.  I ended up taking all the skin off and cutting it up, and the flesh didn't look too bad, so I have hopes.  The marinade is a powerful one anyway (yogurt; peanut oil; tomato, garlic, onion, chili, and ginger processed into a paste; cumin; coriander; garam masala; paprika; cayenne; cardamom; salt; nutmeg), and it will disguise a multitude of sins.  In any case, I'm thinking of making a coconut and raisin biryani pullao to go with it, and that, at least, will be tasty.