One Simple Roast Chicken = At Least Three Dinners

It's the dinner that keeps on giving. Not just a single feast-like meal, roast chicken fits in the category of those magical dinners that, if you can whisk away the platter before there are just scraps left, you've got the makings for at least two more meals, not to mention a decent lunch. And even with just a few scraps left over you can have a big pot of soup and enough stock for risotto.

You can see where I'm going here.

Say you make a roast chicken for your Sunday dinner (left). (Shopping hint: I always buy the biggest one in the case because there's a better chance for leftovers, and it only takes a few minutes longer to cook.) After it's been ripped apart by your ravenous family/fellow diners and they've gone off to their postprandial pursuits, take the plates into the kitchen. Scrape the bones into a pot along with any innards that came with the chicken. Then pull off the meat from any pieces left on the platter, scraping the bones into the aforementioned pot.

Now it's time to attack the carcass with your hands, pulling off even smaller shreds and adding it to your growing pile of meaty bits. Break the carcass in half—this is super easy once all the meat is gone—and put it in the pot. Add water to cover the carcass and put it on the stove to simmer for about an hour (this can be done anytime, really—just put the pot in the fridge until you've got an hour to make the stock). Notice I don't add any other vegetables to make the stock…I like to add those when I'm making whatever the final dish calls for. Put the leftover meat in the fridge.

So what do you have? Well, you'll probably come away with two to three quarts of stock once the bones have been strained off, which you can freeze for soups, risottos or whatever other quickie dinner you choose to make later in the week. Depending on how much meat I've yanked from the mouths of my family and scavenged from the carcass, I usually get upwards of a couple of cups of meat or maybe more. It's enough to throw in a pot of chicken soup, a chicken pot pie or a risotto, with perhaps enough left for a chicken curry sandwich for lunch.

As for that first, lovely roast chicken dinner, if you make the recipe below, in 90 minutes you'll have a one-pot meal, if you count the carrots as your vegetable. Which, of course, I do.

Roasted Chicken with Root Vegetables

3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 carrots, halved and cut in 1/4" slices
3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1 tsp. dried thyme
3-4 c. root vegetables like sweet potatoes, yams, squash, parsnips, potatoes, turnips, etc.
1 roasting chicken or large fryer
1/2 c. white wine or dry vermouth
Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375°. Pull the chicken out the fridge, removing any wrapping, and let it sit on the counter on a couple of paper towels to come to room temperature.

Pour 2 Tbsp. oil into a large frying pan over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add onions and sauté until translucent. Add carrots and sauté till tender, then add garlic and sauté briefly. Turn off heat and stir in the thyme and root vegetables. Put mixture in 9" by 12" Pyrex casserole dish. Pour wine over vegetables.

Rub chicken with remaining 1 Tbsp. oil and throw 1 tsp. or so salt into the cavity and place the chicken on its side on top of the vegetables. Place in oven and roast for 25 minutes. Remove from oven, turn chicken on its other side and roast for another 25 minutes. Remove from oven, turn chicken so it is breast-side up, baste with pan juices and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast another 15 minutes, remove and baste, then roast a final 20 minutes or, for our tastes, until an instant-read thermometer reads 150° on the inside of the lower thigh and the inner side of the breast next to the rib cage. Remove from oven, allow to rest for 10 minutes. Cut it into pieces, removing the breasts whole and slicing them crosswise.

Fabulous Roast Chicken with Apologies to Sam Sifton

I don't know if this is true of other cooks, but I can't seem to follow a recipe to save my life. Even though I consider myself a recipe-dependent cook rather than one of those people who, like my friend Denise, freestyles her way through ingredients, following her intuition to come up with creative, fabulous meals.

This entire blog is a testament to my need for guidance, chock-full as it is of favorite recipes gleaned from family dinners and camping trips, or—ssssshhhh…don't tell!—stolen from friends. So the other day when I was browsing through the New York Times magazine and saw a gorgeous photo of a dish of roasted chicken legs, I had to stop and check out the recipe.

The article, by the Times' food editor, Sam Sifton, whose writing I find pretty irresistible, clever without being one of those "Look at me! Look at me! I can do a double flip!" food writers, was an interview with the designer Steven Stolman. He'd first had the dish, called Roasted Chicken Provençal, as a college student in New York.

Sifton wrote, "the chicken was seasoned with spices meant to evoke the flavors of southern France: rosemary, thyme, bay leaf, lavender, marjoram, chervil, sage. It all seemed exotic and wonderful to Stolman, a child of the Hartford suburbs and new to Manhattan. 'I thought it was the coolest thing,' [Stolman] said. The dish and the evening left an impression on him that has lasted for almost 40 years."

A couple of paragraphs later Sifton wrote, "it is still the coolest thing: chicken dusted in flour and roasted with shallots and lemons and vermouth under a shower of herbes de Provence until it has gone crisp above the fat and wine and lemon juice, and the shallots are melted and sweet."

It's a dead simple recipe, and with my crazy love of roasted chicken it seemed like a natural for a test run. And that's where I went ever-so-slightly off the rails. You see, I had almost everything the recipe called for…except shallots. Hm. While it sounds like they're pretty crucial to getting the dish just right, I've also cooked enough chicken to know that shallots aren't a make-or-break ingredient.

So I decided to throw in a few extra garlic cloves and call it good. Then I saw a half-full basket of cherry tomatoes left over from a vinaigrette I'd made a couple of days before sitting on the counter. Those'd be good, too, and still keep it in the Provençal theme. Pulling the chicken out of the fridge my eyes fell on a dozen or so leftover oil-cured olives. They're Mediterranean, too, right?

Except for those "tweaks," if you can call it that, I pretty much made the chicken as originally intended and it was indeed as wonderful as advertised. Like Stolman, I'll definitely make it again and probably serve it to company. Maybe I'll even follow the recipe.

Roasted Chicken Provençal (Kind Of)

4 chicken legs or 8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs

2 tsp. kosher salt

1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

1/2-3/4 c. all-purpose flour

3 Tbsp. olive oil

2 Tbsp. herbes de Provence

1 lemon, quartered

8-10 cloves garlic, peeled

1 1/2 c. cherry tomatoes, halved

1 dozen or so oil-cured olives, pitted and halved

1/3 c. dry vermouth

Preheat oven to 400. Season the chicken with salt and pepper. Put the flour in a shallow pan, and lightly dredge the chicken in it, shaking the pieces to remove excess flour.

Swirl the oil in a 9” by 12” pyrex roasting dish, and place the floured chicken in it skin-side up. Season the chicken with the herbes de Provence. Arrange the lemons, garlic cloves, cherry tomatoes and olives around the chicken, and then add the vermouth to the pan.

Put the pan in the oven, and roast for 25 to 30 minutes, then baste it with the pan juices. Continue roasting for an additional 25 to 30 minutes, or until the chicken is very crisp and the meat cooked through.

Serve in the pan or on a warmed platter.

Fall Has Fell: Roast Chicken

About this time of year, when the temperatures start cooling down and I hear the leaves from our ash trees crunching underfoot, I start thinking about turning on the oven and making some of those favorite dishes that have been left off our tables all summer. What with all the barbecuing of large hunks of meat, the tomatoes (and tomatoes and tomatoes) piling up in the kitchen and the unbelievably fabulous fruit at the farmers markets, what else could we do but surf the avalanche?

So now that things have calmed down a bit, I bought a large roasting chicken at the store. I always ask for the biggest one, the better to have leftovers for other delicious dishes like enchiladas or chicken pot pie. I think the largest I've roasted was over nine pounds, more like a small turkey, really. But still not larger than Chester (right), our gorgeous hunk of 13-lb. marmalade cat. (Still unroasted.)

Anyway, about that chicken. I use James Beard's method, which calls for roasting the bird on a bed of vegetables, turning it every once in awhile to get a good infusion of aromatics of whatever kind. As usual, I mess around with the recipe, covering it with bacon during roasting (afterwards you can crumble the bacon over the mashed potatoes and gravy or use it in a salad), or stuffing the cavity with a half lemon and a bunch of fresh herbs like tarragon or thyme. And doggone if it doesn't turn out beautifully every time! (That's how it gets to be a favorite, you know.)

Jimmy's Roast Chicken Kinda
loosely adapted from James Beard's American Cooking

3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 carrots, halved and chopped
2 ribs celery, halved and chopped
1/2 c. white wine or dry vermouth
1 roasting chicken
1/2 lemon
Handful of fresh herbs (sage, rosemary, thyme or tarragon)
4-5 slices bacon, optional
Salt to taste

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Pour 2 Tbsp. oil into a frying pan and saute onions, carrots and celery (or whatever vegetables you might have) till slightly tender but not fully cooked. Put in 9" by 12" pyrex casserole dish (or your favorite Le Creuset roaster). Pour wine over vegetables.

Rub chicken with remaining 1 Tbsp. oil, throw 1 tsp. or so salt and the lemon and herbs into the cavity and place the chicken on its side on top of the vegetables. If using bacon, drape strips crosswise over the chicken. Place in oven and roast for 25 minutes. Remove from oven, turn chicken on its other side (relaying bacon, if using it, on top) and roast for another 25 minutes. Remove from oven, turn chicken so it is breast-side up (again draping bacon), baste with pan juices and sprinkle with salt. Roast another 15 minutes, remove and baste, then roast a final 20 minutes or, for our tastes, until an instant-read thermometer reads 160 degrees on the inside of the lower thigh. Remove from oven, allow to rest for 10 minutes. We cut it into pieces, but the breasts we remove whole and slice crosswise.