Roast Chicken

Eastside Road, August 2, 2010—

FIRST YOU GET YOUR chicken, and that's the hard part. Lindsey visited two supermarkets and the local mostly-organic market and found nothing but massproduced chickens from the Arkansas cartel. Finally our dependable Healdsburg independent supermarket, Big John's, came through with a Rosie.

I'd planned to use Judy Rodgers's recipe from her magnificent book The Zuni Café Cookbook (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), but she (rightly) requests you to roast a fryer, no more than three and a half pounds; our Rosie was a bit under five pounds. Still, I generally followed her technique, salting the bird as soon as I got it home, heating the oven to 500°, heating the roasting pan, then setting the bird in the dry hot pan and into the oven it went.

The smoke alarm went off after a while, of course — no big deal. I dropped the temperature to about 450° and cooked the chicken for a little over an hour, adding some potatoes and mushrooms about halfway through, when I turned the chicken onto its breast for 15 minutes or so. No flavorings: just chicken and salt.

With the chicken and potatoes and mushrooms, broccoli; afterward, green salad. Surely roast chicken is one of the Hundred Plates. And we have the next two meals taken care of, and then will come the soup. Thanks, Judy.

Cheap Pinot grigio