Alright, roast chicken. Cribbed from a Bon Appetit recipe. Easy. All you need is the following:

black pepper (1/2 t), herbs de provence (1/4 c), olive oil (1/4 c), salt (1 t), garlic (6 cloves, minced fine).

Oh yeah, and Millie.

Giving her a name makes her tastier

Before I begin, some notes on Millie.

If not for prior experience, I'd feel a lot worse for Millie. After all, as a practiced eye can see, she's not a free range bird. She is a factory-produced monster, pumped so full of growth hormones that you can feel the 'roid rage work its dark magic just from standing too close to her. Finished off with salt water, probably injected via some alien probe-looking thing with lots of pointy bits. Ugly. Ida sprung for the crunchier option, but my wife and I did a budget work-up last month and concluded that we've been spending on the upwards of 1600 bigguns a month on groceries- that's a thousand dollars over our bottom line. We live across the street from a grocery store and we have three kids, what are you gonna do. Answer: buy into Big Chicken.

Anyhow, I don't feel so bad about it. See, we raised chickens for three years- inherited our landlord's brood when we moved into our current house, treated them like our own until our landlord decided that he wanted to play farmer again and took them to his new place.

Here's what I'll say about chickens: they are the vilest, most prehistorically stupid creatures ever to curse the range with their existence. Ornery, petty feather-lizards. At one point we made the mistake of introducing a new one into the flock- Penny- who was summarily pecked half to death (now you know the origin of the term "pecking order"). I had to finish the job a week later when her failed limping attempts at the feed dispenser, rebuffed by her compatriots, made it clear that she was doomed to starvation or a messier end at the jaws of some mangy suburban predator.

Anyhoo, all this is to say that chickens. Are. Terrible. And I'm talking the varietals we've bred to be as docile as possible, god knows what they get away with in the wild. So factory chicken: A-okay by me. Until I get whatever cancer you get from eating too much factory chicken. Then I'll probably have some things to say. Onward.

1. Preheat oven to 475.

2. Mix all above ingredients in a bowl, excluding Millie.

3. Slip your hands under the chicken skin, separate from the bird.

4. Rub as much of that sweet herb slurry under the skin as you can.

By the way, don't forget to take the giblets out of Millie's cavity, and save them for later:

I'll get to them when I'm good and ready

5. Place on wire rack placed inside of a roasting pan. Stick that shit into the oven.

6. Roast until skin is brown.

7. Lower heat to 350, roast for like another 45 minutes to an hour (shorter if you sprung for the more natural, smaller bird). Until the inside is 160 or something.

8. Carve it. Save the carcass. Eat it. EAT IT

I had it with crusty bread (would've made it myself if I'd planned better), balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and the rest of what used to be a gigantic bottle of Knob Creek:

so much brown in this picture

So what, roast chicken. Big deal. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE. I'm gonna take all the left over bones, meat, drippins', and giblets and make a fucking. Pie out of them tomorrow, to be added to this post in an update. If you're gonna eat meat, use every part of the beast, I say. I'll be back.

FOLLOW UP:

Quick breakdown of what I did w/ rest:

Stock w/ bones & giblets (w/ various other veggies):

Basics of inside of pie, more or less:

Also made the roux ouf of the rendered chicken fat instead of butter; finished product was gravy using the chicken stock.

Whole pie looked like this:

Cross section like this:

Tasted a whole lot like chicken. I'm ready for a meal that's not chicken.