Roast Chicken with Rosemary and Thyme Potatoes

So. I'm not a cook. At all. I know, like, 20 meals tops (and that includes spaghetti and mashed potatoes) and even those usually turn out...well...edible, but not exactly mindblowingly good. So I try to stick to stuff where you can't do a whole lot wrong and I rarely cook anything that takes longer than 20 minutes to make. I'll do a roast for Christmas, but that's pretty much it. Last Christmas, I overplanned a bit and wanted to do a marinated beef roast and a roast chicken, but the beef turned out to be so much that I had to eat it for three days straight to get through it, so the chicken's been sitting in my freezer ever since.

So. Cue the long weekend, a public holiday and me with too much time on my hands, so I thought I'd give the roast chicken a go. And it didn't turn out too badly.



More than that, it was finally an excuse to use my chicken roaster that's been sitting in my cupboard for like 2 years now. I love it because not only is it shaped like a chicken (which I only realized after it had been sitting there for 6 months), it helps make your chicken really crispy, because all the fat can run out while it's roasting.



I did forget, however, how weird it feels handling a whole chicken. I think when you're just roasting or frying a chicken breast or a steak or whatever you can easily forget that you're holding part of an animal in your hands. I never thought about that before today, but it felt kinda weird for a moment to pick it free of its last feathers and move its legs and wings around. Anyway.. I feel a bit weird writing down a recipe for this, because there wasn't much actual cooking going on. I used a ready-made seasoning and just stuck it in the oven on 190°C for about 65 minutes. What I like to do though is instead of brushing it with oil while it's cooking, I like to brush it with milk every quarter hour, which makes the skin extra-crispy. The potatoes were brushed with olive oil and seasoned with salt, pepper, thyme and rosemary and I just stuck them in the oven about 20 minutes before the chicken was done. Just make sure you cut the potatoes about equally thick so they're done at about the same time. Mine were about half a centimeter thick.



Alright, I'm off to find some dessert!

♥ Nicole