Author Notes
As a sophomore at the University of Florida in 1992, I found myself deliriously happy to be in an apartment (with a kitchen) and out of a horrid dorm, finally free of meal plans/dining halls. I was a transfer student and I proceeded slowly, making friends and spending a lot of time exploring southern grocery stores and cooking. Being underage, keg parties got to be fairly boring after a while and I started hosting dinner parties at my apartment. I cooked and my "of age" room-mate bought the boxes (yes, I said boxes!) of wine. This is one of the frequent things I made and it was always a hit. I always served it with a big salad and garlic bread. I even used a freshly killed chicken a few times (a friend's father kept chickens).
This was also made for a small simple Thanksgiving celebration I had before all my friends went home for the holidays. —testkitchenette
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Ingredients
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4 pounds
best quality roasting chicken
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butter and olive oil, softened together
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1 tablespoon
butter
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salt and pepper
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1
lemon, cut in half
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small onion, roughly chopped
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1
head of garlic, cut in half
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1 sprig
rosemary
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1 pound
red potatoes, scrubbed and quartered
Directions
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Preheat oven to 400F
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Rub chicken all over with butter and olive oil mixture and season inside and out with salt and pepper. Put tablespoon of butter inside the chicken along with half the lemon (squeeze some of the juice over chicken), chopped onion, 1/2 of the garlic head, and rosemary sprig.
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Toss potatoes with a bit of olive oil and put on the bottom of a roasting pan and season with some salt and pepper. Add in other half of the head of garlic and other half of the lemon in with the potatoes. Over the potatoes lay down a cookie drying rack or a roasting rack and put the chicken on top of it.
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Roast the chicken 20 minutes per pound of chicken plus an extra 30 minutes. The total cooking time for this recipe with be 1 hour and 50 minutes. Remove from the oven (you can use a thermometer if you want to check the chickens' temperature) and let rest for a few minutes.
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I tend to hack the chicken up into pieces and serve on a large platter with the potatoes on the side (heavenly basted with the chicken fat as they cooked). Feel free to make a gravy/sauce with the juices and bits left over at the bottom of the roasting pan.
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