- Thawed the chicken
- Washed it inside and out
- Placed in glass baking dish
- which I have readily available, so that's what I use
- Refroze the liver and other giblets
- you know, for the sickos in the audience (you know who you are) who like such things
- so they can be cooked separately
- Stuck the neck back in the cavity
- because I'll eat that
- Added four cups of water to the glass baking dish
- to prevent undo drying
- Placed the lot in the oven
- Set oven for 350°
- Started stop watch app on iPhone
- And ignored for the next two hours
In truth, this bird will get to a lot higher temperature. So much so, I will check for doneness (if, indeed, I check for doneness: a technical term if ever there was one) by twisting a leg... on the theory that a cooked bird will have fully cooked cartilage; and so, all the bones will turn easily in their sockets.
But like I said, please look elsewhere for your cooking temperature (and/or how to tell if a chicken is done) advice.
Any-the-way, a few minutes later after rooting through the freezer to figure out what to eat for dinner tonight (the chicken is for tomorrow, I want to precook it for nachos... or whatever), I decided to throw a rack of ribs in the oven as well.
This Rack-o-Ribs:
- Remove from freezer
- Plop into (yet another) glass dish
- Add four cups of water
- because it's a lucky amount, obviously
- Slide into oven
- And, forget-about-it.
Hmm, I managed to reset my timer (or never set it, at all). But I think I cooked both chicken and ribs for about 2.5 hours.
Either way (now that the meat is out) the Blueberry Brownies are going into the oven (and as covered in yet another post). So, a super busy cooking night (tonight) for me. It's pretty much what I did all night:
Roast Chicken
Ribs
Italian Sausage Delight
Blueberry Brownies
Not a bad way to spend an evening. Also, while I'm in the writing mood. I think one of the reasons I went cooking crazy tonight was the slim number of write ups I did for the month of June... you know, because I sort of see this Quickie Recipe project as quickly numbering in the hundreds... which it just won't if I only average two a month.
But whatever.
It is the next day... and time to eat ribs!
For sauce, I very carefully measured:
4 teaspoons honey (or really, what I did was look at a measuring teaspoon, eyeball it, and scoop two lumps of honey about the size of a rounded teaspoon, so, like marble sized hunks, but shooters, not the small sized marbles, which I figure are about 2 teaspoons worth each)
4 teaspoons hot mustard (Chinese style, more or less)
½ cup pickle juice
Actually, I just dolloped whatever into a jar and filled it to the line (the line that I presume is for a half cup) with pickle juice and shook it all about. Then, set the lot on the stove to warm up (a little) along with the ribs.
Oh, and although this sauce is hyper thin, I have no worries about it's flavour. The mustard I am using is quite strong (silly strong... or seriously strong... or stupid strong... or something like that... strong) and the ribs don't really need that much.
But you know what? The sauce was too runny! Oh, well. I'll try something else for the second half of the slab.
And at this point (after the fact, days later), let's see if I can even remember how I ate the chicken:
- Chicken Fajitas
- chicken pan fried with onions and peppers on tortillas with all the usual trimmings
- Straight Meat
- out of a sandwich bag with Plum Jelly & Balsamic Vinegar as a sauce.
- Bones
- reheated scrap meat (the carcass and the like) eaten straight out of the pan with lots of salt and balsamic and a touch of raspberry jam (all shaken together for a sauce).
- Broth
- after adding all that extra water, I had a bit of extra juice leftover, which I drank as a broth.
July, 2018