Juicy roasted chicken

I have recently discovered that I can, indeed, roast a chicken. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that until a few months ago, I had never roasted an entire chicken before. It just seemed so advanced, so grown-up. Well, after becoming educated about how chickens are generally raised for slaughter (in horrendous conditions and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics) I had just about quit eating chicken altogether. I missed it. Chicken is so good, and healthy. Then I discovered that Costco carries a brand of chicken called Coleman's Natural that is organic, antibiotic and hormone-free, and that are fed no animal by-products. It's expensive, though. Really expensive. As one would expect, the full chickens are the cheapest per pound. So I needed to learn to either cook a full chicken or cut up a raw chicken. I went with the former. And guess what I discovered? It's easy. Really easy. Who knew? (Probably lots of people, actually, but not me.) I picked up a simple recipe from Allrecipes.com and made a few tweaks, and I couldn't be happier. Delicious, moist chicken. We always roast 2 at a time, one for eating and the other to cut up for other recipes. Finally, I am a real grown-up cook. (Don't tell anyone, but I've never roasted a turkey either. Maybe now I can take a stab at it. How hard can it be?)


Juicy Roasted Chicken

1 whole chicken, giblets removed.
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup butter
1 stalk celery, cut in sticks
1/2 of a lemon, quartered,
1/2 of a small onion, quartered

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place chicken in roasting pan (a square Pyrex dish works great) and season inside and out with salt and pepper (be very generous). Place 3 Tablespoons of the butter in the chicken cavity. Then stuff the chicken with the celery sticks, the lemon and onion wedges. Arrange the remaining butter, sliced into pats, on the outside of the chicken (see photo below). Bake chicken for 1 - 1/4 hour to 1 - 1/2 hour in the preheated oven. Remove from oven and baste with the drippings. Cover with aluminum foil and allow to rest for 30 minutes before serving. Delish.

Homemade trail mix

Yesterday I went shopping at Costco for the month's groceries, and when we got home, we made trail mix. We like to make our own trail mix here, for a couple of reasons. 1: It's significantly cheaper, even if you use the same ingredients, which we don't. 2: You can personalize it. I will not give you a recipe here, because I like to think anyone capable of reading this blog is capable of figuring out what they want in their trail mix. But I will give you some ideas.

Costco trail mix, which is my inspirational basis, has peanuts, almonds, cashews, raisins, and m&m's. It's a very basic mix, but good enough to have it's own facebook fan page. (These day, I wonder if that actually means anything.) As we have no allergies in our house, we use peanuts for our base as well. We also add almonds (the bags of baking almonds at Costco are cheaper than the roasted almonds, and you could roast them if you wanted to, but I leave mine raw.) We grow our own pecans, so they go in as well. Cheapo, and yummy. I have several in my family who do not like cashews, so I don't put them in. (I just buy them and eat them myself.) For the sweet, we put in raisins and Craisins. The Craisins add a bit of color, and they're well-priced at Costco. I don't want m&m's, because they're a bit pricey, and total sugar. I do like the sweet ingredient, though, so we also add chocolate covered raisins to ours. Finally, we add some sort of cracker-y thing. Pretzel sticks are great, or cheese nips. Whatever you like and find on sale. This month I splurged and bought goldfish to go in. That will drive the price up, but the kids thought I was a very cool mama. The trick to making it cheaper is to look at the per ounce price (so conveniently figured out for you at Costco. Use a calculator anywhere else.) If the per ounce price of the ingredient is lower than the per ounce price of pre-made trail mix, you're saving money. There are a lot of other ingredients you could add, if you liked. I've though of a few for future use: shredded coconut, gummy bears or Swedish fish, yogurt covered pretzels, sunflower seeds, toasted pumpkin seeds, skittles, cheese balls...the possibilities are vast. Good luck with yours. Once you get it made, the real trick is to keep it from disappearing too fast.