Roast Chicken

You may have noticed that I took a little hiatus from posting over the past few weeks. To be honest, I just wasn’t feeling it. I guess it was a combination of feeling a bit overwhelmed with juggling all the things in my life (working two part time jobs, school, dogs, holiday get-togethers, helping hubby make a few extra bucks by doing some work for a friend), so it wasn’t my highest priority. Also, I was worried that I’d been annoying my facebook friends by linking to my posts too often. I have plenty of people that annoy me to death on facebook and I really didn’t want to become one of those people. Yet I sense that the majority of people who read this blog do so because I post those links. I’m a little confused, then, as to whether I should continue this blog. I enjoy it, yes, and I feel a sense of pride  about it, but do people read it?

Anyway, I’ve had a break and I think I feel better. Also, I finally discovered pictures of roast chicken that I accidentally buried in a folder of pictures from my sophomore year in college, and I was excited about this because I’d been looking for them since August.

And I’m drinking wine. But that’s totally unrelated.

This was a recipe posted by Ree on The Pioneer Woman Cooks over the summer. I made it a few weeks later and it was delicious and especially photogenic.

See? Pretty ingredients.

I started off by zesting the lemon.

And tossing the zest in a bowl.

Then I took some of the fresh rosemary off its sprig

and chopped it all up.

I threw it in the bowl with the lemon zest

And took a poorly lit and oddly focused picture of some softened butter thrown in there, as well.

Here it is all mixed up.

Basically, you put a whole chicken on a greased baking sheet and smear the butter all over it.

In retrospect, this seems pretty disgusting. I feel as though I used far more butter than I was supposed to. But I feel as though I should also mention that the lemon zest smelled wonderful and it was easy to get carried away. I swear.

Next, halve the lemons. Squeeze one over the chicken itself.

Shove some sprigs of rosemary into the cavity,

Followed by as many lemon halves as you can get in there.

And then roast it until it looks like this and the internal temp is where it should be (don’t make me go look it up. I don’t remember what that is and I’m feeling lazy from a day of playing in the snow with huskies, alternated with watching movies with hubby).

Let it rest for at least 10 minutes, then serve it up! I served it with broccoli and rice. Simple and easy.

And delicious.

Okay, yes, it was a LOT of butter. That came across in the taste. It was really tasty, though I do remember thinking that it was a bit much to take in. Next time, I’ll scale it back. But the tasted of the butter, combined with the lemon and rosemary, was really good overall. The meal was easy to put together and tasty, and it also made for good leftovers. If I recall correctly, they went toward a barbecue chicken pizza or something like that.

I recommend clicking over to Ree’s original post and giving the recipe a try. Her pictures are far more professional than mine, anyway.

And if you have any thoughts on the future of this little blog project, please leave a comment!