Of life and chicken.

After a three month hiatus from blog writing, I am back!  Caleb and I were pleased to announce in March that we are expecting our first baby around Thanksgiving!  However, from March to May, I have was not too keen on looking at pictures of food or smelling food, or blogging about recipes, which partially explains the absence of posts.  What a joy it was yesterday to be able to prepare a monthly menu without feeling any ill effects!  Today, Caleb and I experienced a kitchen incident, so I will blog about that.

First, however, a quick life update since my last post.  Here are some things we have learned over the past three months: April  is too early for camping if you don't like waking up to snow.  Fishing and actually catching a fish are two very different things, and we have yet to accomplish the later this season, although we have done lots of the first.  Buying a $30 annual Discover Pass is well worth it.  Treating nausea caused by morning sickness is contrary to common sense - eat when you are nauseated and feel the least like it, and hopefully you will feel better!  If you serve dinner before youth group, your youth group will double in size (well, maybe not because of that!).  No matter how much you nurture and invest in growing healthy, flourishing vegetable starts from seed indoors, if you don't harden them first, they will curl up and die within hours of transplanting them out in the garden, even after the last frost.

A couple of months back, I bought a whole chicken, hoping to be economical instead of just buying chicken breast all the time.  It has been sitting in the freezer intimidating me since then (handling raw meat is not my favorite part of cooking), until I finally bite the bullet and thawed it yesterday.  I did some online research and went with a simple approach.

First, I rinsed off the chicken and removed the pack of innards, which I wanted to throw out, but Caleb saved from heading to the trash and made chicken stock out of them instead (what a good husband!).  Then, I patted the chicken dry with some paper towels (supposedly to make a better roasted skin) and rubbed it with a mixture of herbs (I used fresh sage and rosemary and dried thyme), black pepper, coarse sea salt, and olive oil.  I stuffed the chest cavity with onion slices and a couple of whole garlic cloves.

Then, I placed it in a 9x13 glass dish to bake since I don't own a roasting pan, and put it in a 450 degree oven for an hour to roast.  I checked on it a couple times, checked its temp with the meat thermometer, let it go a little longer, then called for Caleb to help me maneuver it out of the oven.  It was quite smokey, and our smoke alarm went off, but that is not unusual for this house - it happens just about anytime we bake anything for some reason (and not because we always burn things...).  Caleb lifted the pan out of the oven and set it on the stove top.  We looked away for a second, and the entire pan shattered!

I am so grateful neither one of us was hurt, and am glad I had asked for Caleb to help me with it so I wasn't the only one around when it happened!  It was quite a hot, greasy mess to clean up, but Caleb did most of the hard work, and the glass mostly broke off in chunks, not little shards.  The part directly under the chicken came off in large pieces, thankfully, and we carefully picked the chicken over because we did not want to sacrifice our week of dinners!

I am not sure I can recommend using a glass baking dish at the temperature, but the seasoning method turned out wonderfully - it has excellent, rich flavor!