One Chicken- Two Meals

As you may have noticed, when it comes to cooking chicken I am mainly concerned with crispy skin, crispy skin, and crispy skin. Roasting is an ideal and pretty darn easy way to gain it. Lately I had become enamored of the idea of spatchcocking. It has been popularized recently in the arena of grilling, but I figured it would just as well if not better in the oven. After all, all that yummy skin that is usually on the bottom of your traditionally roasted bird is now on top, resulting in...oh yeah, more crispy skin. (You will note that although I removed the backbone, I still left the tail attached off to the left hand side of the pic. I am wiley!) Not only do you get more crispy skin for your efforts, but the chicken also cooks much faster. I did mine at a 400 degree convection oven and it was done in a mere 40 mins! Pretty darn quick- even weeknight quick. It took me all of 5 mins to cut out the back bone with my trusty kitchen sissors. A quick sprinkle with lots of coarse salt and pepper, chuck it in the oven and bam. A quick parboil of some sweetpeas on the side and we had dinner. Would you believe that between my daughter and myself we ate ALL the skin off this bird that night? (What can I say? The apple doesn't fall far from the tree....) And after all, that stuff doesn't keep!



Although my love for roast chicken knows no bounds, I have a hard time deciding what to do with the inevitible leftovers. Since I started eating certain meats again, there has been a lot of experimenting with what I can make that will satisfy everyone in my family. Particularly myself, as I still have a lot of weird hangups about meat. I don't like it in salads. I can't handle it "hidden" in anything like a sandwich or tortilla, or drowned in lots of sauce. Soup, however, I can do. ONLY if I or someone I know makes it. (never a can or at a restaurant- don't ask me why! I am weird!) I often make tortilla soup- which husband and I love but Miss D is pretty ambivalent about- so I wanted to try something different. Chicken Soup with Rice is a great one. It works better for a weeknight if you can make the stock the night before. Chuck the chicken carcass and some veggies and herbs in a pot with some (store-bought)chicken stock for an hour, cook your dinner for that night whilst it simmers. Bonus is that leaving the stock in the fridge overnight makes it that much easier to skim off the fat the next day. (Yes, you could just use the chicken stock by itself but this extra step gives it so much more flavor and depth) To make the soup you reheat the broth, add some veggies and rice cook until the rice is done and throw in the leftover shredded chicken at the end. Easy and quick!

I have made this soup before, but I think what really made it this time was the addition of fresh savory that I got in my Fresh Picks box. I've never worked with fresh savory before and it is so yummy and goes with everything I've tried it with so far. (Such as the zucchini pasta i made the night the stock was cooking) I will definitely make an effort to find some to plant in my garden next year.

I don't know if it was the savory, or if Miss D was enamored of the idea of eating something from a song or a book (we own it) but she ate every last drop.