Roasted Chicken with Root Vegetables
The smell of fall is in the air and that means it’s time to eat autumn squash and pumpkins and root vegetables. And I’d never roasted a whole chicken before, so I thought, why not today? The hole in the above picture is a sign of my nervousness that It would turn out too dry— I cut into it at the last minute to see if I needed to take it out early. Luckily it came out succulent and tasty.
I also saw these pumpkins at the store and knew I had to do something with them. So I figured I’d make a roast chicken feast with root vegetables and autumn squash.
Recipe and non-Instagram photos after the jump.
When making this meal I did some prep for another meal I will be making tonight. Because squash takes a bit of time to roast, I figured I’d get a head start by doing all of the roasting in the same oven all at once. Tonight I’m making pumpkin autumn squash ravioli.
Here’s the very start of the roasted chicken dinner.
What you’ll need:
- A whole chicken. Mine was on the small side.
- 3 carrots
- 3 red potatoes
- 1 Idaho potato
- 6 cloves of garlic
- 1 small red & 1 small yellow onion
- rosemary
- dry rub (I used kosher salt, lemon Adobo, Schwartz’s french fry seasoning, garlic powder, onion powder, pepper)
1. Preheat the oven to 300ºF. Wash the chicken under cold water and pat dry.
2. Chop up the potatoes, carrots, onions, and garlic.
3. Rub down the chicken with the dry rub but don’t go nuts. Less is more.
4. Assort the vegetables and rosemary in the pan. Put a couple pieces of onion, garlic, and rosemary in the cavity of the chicken.
5. Truss the chicken with cooking string. If you don’t know how, look it up. There are a few ways to do it, but the idea is to get the bird nice and neat and compact so it’s not flopping all over the place and drying out and all that.
6. Put the trussed chicken on top of your vegetables and make sure it sits in the pan nicely. Put it in the oven at 300º for about 3 hours. Don’t check on it until the 2 hours and 45 minutes mark.
7. At that point, you can baste it just a little, mix the veggies around just a bit, and put some olive oil and s&p on the chicken and the veggies. Turn the heat up to 400º and then take it out after the 15 minutes. It will brown nicely.
And that’s all there is to it.
