Ever feel like NOT cooking? Yeah. Me, too.
I just got home a few hours ago from a whirlwind trip to DC (where I attended the IACP Conference) and New York (where I was a panelist—along with my Paleo pal Danielle Walker—at the Cherry Bombe Jubilee), and just wanted to crawl into bed and zonk out with a pile of unread books.
Last week, I bought Caroline Randall Williams’s Soul Food Love and Andi Mitchell’s It Was Me All Along. At the Cherry Bombe Jubilee, I picked up an armload of new reads: Mimi Sheraton’s 1000 Foods to Eat Before You Die (I got her to sign my copy), Tanya Holland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen, April Bloomfield’s A Girl and Her Pig, and Aki Kamozawa’s Gluten-Free Flour Power. All were fellow presenters at this super girl-power food confab.
But I hadn’t seen my boys since the middle of last week, and as soon as they got home from school, we fell right back into our regular routine. I started prepping dinner while they did homework and chatted me up about all the stuff I’d missed: an Easter egg hunt at their kung fu studio, Big-O’s science fair project, Sunday swimming with their dad, the steak dinner that grandma made, and Lil-O’s decision to fill his diary with drawings of his beloved stuffed cat, Cat. (That’s her name.)
No recipe needed tonight—instead, I just pulled an old trick out of the hat. I cut up all the vegetables that Henry had neglected to cook while I was gone, and tossed them with salt, pepper, and ghee. The veggies went into a roasting pan, along with a chicken I spatchcocked with my trusty kitchen shears. (Here are tutorials on how to do it with a Big Bird (watch the video!) and with a regular chicken.)
I rubbed a generous amount of salt and ghee both under and over the skin of the bird before popping the whole shebang into a preheated 425°F oven.
After about 45 minutes (or more precisely, once the breast registered 150° F on a meat thermometer and the thigh meat hit 170° F—and yes, thermometers are key, people), I rested the chicken on a carving board…
…and added a squeeze of lemon to the vegetables on the bottom of the pan.
It’s not pictured here, but I also roasted broccoli, because: (1) it’s easy, and (2) extra vegetables never hurt anyone. Plus: leftovers are my friend.
After Henry got home and we all tucked into plates of chicken, I picked up my phone and scrolled through my Twitter feed. The fabulous Andy Cohen tweeted that he was stuck on the tarmac waiting to take off for Brazil, and was taking questions.
I had a burning question, and he had the perfect answer:
Why is it so perfect? ’Cause if Andy ever came over for dinner, we wouldn’t have to fight over the same cuts of bird.
I’m thighs all the way. How about you?
