#35: Roast Chicken
When I tell people the shtick behind my blog – about how I’m completing this list of all the recipes deemed essential fare for an accomplished home cook – a lot of people say something along the lines of “oh so you mean foods like the perfect roast chicken, that sort of thing?”. I feel the same way; if you can only cook 5 dishes or fewer, I hope one of them is a roast chicken. After all, what do you make when people are coming over? Roast chicken. What can you make when you need a relatively quick weeknight meal and subsequent days of glorious leftovers? Roast chicken. What does everyone (except for the non-meat-eaters, who frankly won’t have even clicked on this post to begin with) find extremely comforting to eat? Roast chicken.
Are you getting the hint? Roast chicken is the answer to literally all of life’s conundrums. It was right in front of our noses this whole time!
I love roast chicken. It’s right up there as far as comfort foods go. Everybody, absolutely everybody, should have a great roast chicken recipe. This week, you get to decide between three variations, each of which I find so comforting and delicious yet so different and therefore hard to compare. There’s the simple weeknight chicken, roasted in a skillet with leeks and finished with a wine-laced pan sauce. Or the dinner party fave of mine – spatchcocked chicken roasted over spicy merguez sausages (and cooled down with an avocado yogurt sauce). Finally, if you love a brined turkey, you’ll love a brined chicken, especially when it drips all of its salty goodness onto a tray of roasting potatoes beneath it. Decisions are so hard.
