Sunday roast chicken dinner

 Cider-Roasted Chicken

Adapted from “American Favorites” by Betty Rosbottom

Betty Rosbottom is one of my favorite cookbook authors for sheer reliability. I have three of her cookbooks, so you’ll learn about a few more of her recipes later this year. This recipe didn’t disappoint for flavor, and the bird was amazing.

First, a word about the bird: Our brother-in-law received several large chickens from Sanderson Farms for Christmas and shared some of the largesse. It’s billed as all natural, although it’s clearly not a mom-and-pop operation; most of them don’t have NASDAQ ticker symbols.

 

Ingredients:

A half stick of softened butter

2 leeks, white parts chopped

2 medium carrots, sliced

1 Granny Smith apple, unpeeled and diced, with another for stuffing inside the bird, if only you could

1 4 to 4.5 pound chicken

2 cups broth, the good stuff

1.25 cups cider

A half teaspoon each of salt and dried sage leaves mixed with a quarter teaspoon of pepper to rub inside the cavity.

Method:

Cook the leeks and carrots in a bit of the butter and some olive oil until softened, add diced apples for a minute or so. You’re doing this in an oven-safe pan that can hold the chicken, which you’ve rinsed, patted dry and rubbed with the spice mixture inside. (Ditch the giblets.) It calls for putting a whole Granny Smith inside, but heaven help me, I couldn’t manage it even with a five-pound well-thawed bird. Perhaps she’s envisioning much smaller apples. 

You set the bird you’ve attempted to shove apples into on top of the veggies, which already smell heavenly. Then you rub on some more of the butter and drizzle with a mix of broth and cider. You bake for an hour and half to two hours at 375, drizzling periodically with more cider/broth mixture and rubbing on more butter. The result is a gloriously bronzed chicken that’s very tender, which is good enough in its own right.

Then you make a sauce by reducing the strained pan juices, adding in the veggies after they’ve taken a spin through the food processor. The resulting sauce tasted wonderful, but it loses something in the looks department, since it’s kind of globby/greasy looking. The mashed potatoes took to it anyway. Did think about adding some Calvados for even more intense apple flavor. Maybe next time. 

Here’s a look at the recipe and where to buy the book:

We paired this with mashed potatoes, and green beans with lemon vodka cream sauce from the “New Midwestern Table” by Amy Thielen, another of this year’s Christmas presents (thanks, Louis/Rebekah). 

The sauce of butter, garlic, cream, lemon zest and juice, splash of vodka, pepper and fresh dill is wonderful, but it didn’t seem to want to coat the beans, despite reaching the spoon-glazing stage. I wasn’t hoping for white glue sauce levels of coating, just some levels of clinginess.This might have been because I didn’t bother to trim the beans into smaller pieces because I was in a total tear by that point to get dinner on the table before “Downton Abbey” started.

 At any rate, the sauce has definite repeater possibilities, especially over fish, or maybe some steamed carrots.

Click here for the recipe/where to buy the book: