I don't know if I've ever mentioned it before, but I never had any desire to cook. Before moving in with and marrying my husband, I had ventured as far as brats and tacos in terms of dinner preparations. Oh, and a Thanksgiving dinner. Even after we were married, breakfasts and dinners were of the microwave/frozen skillet variety, so when I decided to roast a chicken - like my Thanksgiving dinner adventure - I did it all from the vague memory of watching my mom prepare it when I was a child (and following some packaging instructions).
You might be thinking there are so many downsides to this. As it happened, there was only one: I mistook the back for the the breasts because I just knew that the "hump" was on top. It was the best mistake I could have made, the chicken turned out so good that my husband was still telling me about it days later. So now this is how I always oven-roast a chicken. I wonder if it would work with turkey....
I didn't - and still don't - have a proper roasting pan so I put the chicken on a cooling rack on top of a casserole dish. I use my fingers (my mom will swear to you, she'd never thought she'd see the day where I'd touch raw meat, especially chicken) to spread extra virgin olive oil all over what I can see of the bird (i.e. not the underside), then season for whatever I happen to be in the mood for. Sometimes I load that sucker with every seasoning I find in the cupboard, and sometimes I just use salt, pepper, garlic, dried onion, and parsley.
I roast it in the oven per the package instructions, which is usually about 20 minutes per pound at 325/350-degrees (when I find an oven that doesn't have a mind of its own, I might be able to follow package instructions verbatim). After an hour, I like to baste it. I don't think this makes much of a difference since most of the meat is getting juiced pretty regularly throughout the roasting process, but I always loved doing it as a kid. And now that I finally have a baster and don't have to scorch my arm using a tablespoon, I love it even more.
When roasting is done, I let the chicken rest for a while, then take a knife to it, which is surprisingly easy; I did it all myself this time without losing a finger (not to say that I've lost fingers every other time I've done it, I usually just make my husband carve it up). Since the juices have spent their oven-time dripping off the chicken, into the pan, then bouncing back up to the down-facing chicken breast, the meat is incredibly juicy and literally falls off the bone. I went to cut the leg off and the leg bone just slid out of the whole chicken, complete free of meat.
In theory, you could season the breast-side, then flip it over to roast it to get flavorful skin on the breast meat. But since you don't really eat off the spine anyway, I usually just peel off the crispy, seasoned skin from the back and serve it up with the breast.
I'm a leg n' wing girl, myself. The dark meat has a few more calories than the white, but both have health benefits. And if you've ever met me in person, you know I couldn't hurt to have a few more calories.
This is probably my signature meal. No, those aren't veggies picked from my not-yet-a-reality garden; they're frozen, picked from the Wal-Mart frozen-food section. They accompany oven-roasted, sliced red potatoes seasoned with extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, dried onion, garlic, oregano, and basil, and roasted with the chicken. I didn't roast them long enough this time, however, so I ended up having to cook them on the stove, breakfast-style. Still turned out yum.
When I first made the upside-down mistake and told my mom, she giggled but said she thought I was on to something. Who knows - our kids could one day use the phrase, "You actually roasted a chicken breast-side up?! No way." I swear, it'll be exactly like that, too.
