You can get chicken around 99 cent a pound at the grocer’s, making it the cheapest good meat you can buy to keep yourself alive.
Got myself a few pounds of thighs for this one. Bone-in and skin-on, it ain’t chicken otherwise. Now even though I’m just cooking thighs in this piece, this idea should work for anything up to a full bird less than six pounds. Thing about chicken is it’s good at two things – tasting delicous and killing you if undercooked, so go look up whatever temperature chicken is officially safe to eat at the make sure it’s that temperature before you eat it, or not, point is I ain’t takin’ responsibillity if this poultry kills you. You can cook up like Jimmy Buffet or the Dead Kennedys, either way, alright, let’s get crackin.
You could put on Lonesome Crowded West and pour a glass of costco vodka if you want to. It’s what I’m doing.
Alright first step to amazing oven chicken is you gotta brine it. A brine is a liquid broth you let chicken sit in for some time. Science happens and your chicken becomes intensely more moist and delicous, juicy, oh I’m getting bothered just thinking about it. So a brine is a broth, it’s quite salty, then you add in some sugar, and some spices as tyou see fit. See I whipped up this brine and let the chicken sit in it about 48 or 52 hours, gave science ample time to do its thing. You could do less time or you could do more, last time I checked this was a free country. You folk outside America might wanna check local chicken brinin’ law.
Preheat your oven to 450, yeah, that’s hot. Awful hot. Should get a good sear on it. While your oven is heatin up (should take a tall minute) start chopping up whatever vegetables you got that would make sense.
When you roast chicken in the oven, the bird (or pieces of it) typically let their sweet and delicious chicken drippins drip on down to the pan. Doubly so if you brined it. So if you’re roastin chickens, you should toss some vegetables in there under it. Make them vegetables delicious. You’d be losin money if you didn’t. Shake some seasonings on top of them vegetables.
In the photo here I’m cookin up some cabbage, onion, and carrot. It’s a real shame potato makes you fat. You’re going to want to cut your root/underground vegetables (potato, carrot, etc.) small since it ain’t going to be in the oven too long.
Put your bird, pieces of bird, whatever, on top of the veggies. Look at that, beautiful. Put some seasonings on the chicken if you please, it’ll probably just get the skin but you might feel better about yourself and that’s what really counts.
It ain’t nothin personal, chicken, it’s just the way of things.
Let the oven go 450 for 1 hour on these things. Truth is I never tried this time and temp on thighs, I did it a week or two ago on a whole five pound bird and it worked so I figured it may work on five pounds worth of bird if you can keep up.
Well it’s in the oven now.
Not much to type about.
I’m watching the Sopranos, I guess you could too. It’s a top shelf TV show, real good, sort of fillin’ that void Breaking Bad left behind. Figure I’ll re-watch Breaking Bad sometime but now is too soon. Maybe a year or two? Maybe ten, maybe fifty.
Somewhat off topic, but I tell you, ain’t no pleasure greater in the world than stumbling on top of an old Simpsons episode you ain’t seen before. It hasn’t happened to me in maybe three or four years now, last time it has it was that softball episode. Them sideburns. What a wonderful, amazing tv series. It’s too bad what’s happening to it these days but I guess people gotta have jobs.
You know I’ll be getting that Wii U soon. Ordered me some refurbished Nintendo remotes, I figure if I can’t find a good online deal for the 3d world bundle by the time them remotes show up in the mail I’ll just drive down to the local retailer and buy one. It looks good, man, Nintendo doing their old ways. They better. The rest of the industry abandoned couch multiplayer, but could you think of better memories then them?
Tell you, I don’t know.
We been smashing more, us zesty crew. Donkey Kong as much a menace he ever been, but pac man, pac man is a problem. Dude drops fire hydrants like I dropped calculus. No idea what pac man got to do with fire hydrants but you call up Box and you ask him whether or not Pac Man is a problem. I tell you he’ll respond in the affirmative.
I figure there’s about thirty minutes left on the bird.
Been reading any good books lately? I’m about half way into David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King” and it’s pretty good and it’s pretty bad but overall it’s worth a read. First book by that fella I ever read. Takes place in Peoria, IL which is an interesting place to place a book. It’s about the most city in one place you’ll find south of the i-80 line in that state.
What did you wanna be when you were a kid? Funny as it sounds I wanted to be a Dentist. Maybe around 13 or 14 I figured most people don’t have the type of mouths I’d like to dig around. You know people ask you if the 18 year old you would like the today you and if he would maybe he shouldn’t. Loose thoughts, forgive me. Neurons fire off like OK Corral when you’re waiting for that chicken to cook.
Awh, hell, there I went. Five or ten paragraphs worth of nothin’ at all. Maybe I’ll just close this laptop till the bird comes out.
There you go. Some delicious chicken, some delicious vegetables, and we learned a little something about ourselves along the way.
Keep on Chooglin.