Sunday Dinner - The Whole Bird

Tonight's menu:

• A whole, roasted chicken!
• Butternut squash gratin
• Biscuits

This meal was another inspiration from my coworker, Richard. He mentioned to me the other day that it was chick-ordering time. Naturally this made me curious, so I asked him to explain. Apparently, in addition to raising geese and ducks for their excellent eggs, his family also raises chickens for meat. Consequently, they eat chicken a lot, and one of their standard ways to get good use out of the entire bird is to roast it. They usually roast one or two chickens over the weekend, and use the leftovers to make a variety of meals throughout the week. This is not only economical, it's convenient and eco-friendly, as they generally make soup stock out of the bones.

So I thought, why not try it out? Obviously, not being chicken owners, we had to purchase the bird. We did get a local Vermont chicken though, so at least we tried to be green about it. Once again I do not have the original recipe source, but it was a good one. We made a paste out of mashed garlic (about 6 cloves) and kosher salt, and rubbed half of this all over the inside of the chicken. Then we mixed the rest of the paste with softened butter and rubbed that all over the outside of the chicken. We stuffed the chicken with two whole lemons (pricked with a fork so the juices could come out) and roasted it at 400 degrees for a little over an hour. Since we now have a meat thermometer, we were able to do a perfect roast by temperature rather than our usual method of slicing bits off until we're sure it's done. Our thermometer has a handy guide showing the temperature for different meats, so when it hit the "poultry" reading we knew we were good! Here's the uncarved fowl in all its glory:


Our second dish was a butternut gratin. We chose this recipe just because it looked good, but as it turns out winter squash are on sale at the co-op, so it was cheap as well! We followed the recipe from Care2.com exactly, and it turned out perfect. Sweet and savory, with a hint of cheese but not loaded down with it like so many gratin dishes are. The cumin is really what made the dish great. It's not a spice I would probably have thought to add on my own, but it was very good. Definitely recommended!


And then, after all that hard work making two dishes out of local foods, all from scratch...we cheated and made biscuits from a can. And you know what? They were absolutely freakin' perfect. Sometimes you just need that artificial butter flavor to round out a meal.