Chicken Night

The night of grocery shopping is usually eating out.  I've done enough.  But the night after...it's chicken night.  I love chicken night.

The logic in it is simple.  I have uses for whole chickens, but I don't have the freezer room, so they get cooked first and the rest of the meat goes in the freezer.  If we are cooking one chicken, we might as well cook two.

Maggie roasted them tonight.  She coated them with olive oil spices.  She decided to try thyme, basil, garlic powder, and salt.  This was a mixture I'd never tried, and it was dreamy.  Nestled side by side in a 9x12 Pyrex dish in a 425 degree oven, breasts down, they became golden and toasty, juices running into the pan so that the white meat was immersed in the juices,soaking up the flavor of the herbs.  Amazing.

Accompanied by roasted cauliflower and sugar snap peas, a salad, and iced tea, it is one of my favorite dinners.

Then the work starts.  We pick all the meat off the bones, saving the breast meat for salads and chicken salad, which is what the rest of the cauliflower is going into as well.  The dark meat is going into the freezer to wait for a soup.  The bones will be in the freezer too, for stock.  Those juices that in the Pyrex are strained and the herbed chicken fat will be used for sauteing veggies.

And then there's the dishes.  It's more work than I like to do on a warm night in an oven-heated kitchen, but it will be worth it.

(Pictures would've been nice, but I decided to write about it after it was all cleaned up).