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I just began roasting chickens last fall, and have yet to completely perfect it. In an effort to save some time and try something new, I picked up one of those Perdue seasoned roasters in a bag and tried to cook it with some root vegetables.

Let's just say I'm going to go back to wrestling with my normal Fairway's free-range roasters and bucket of unnamed flavor concoctions until I get it right. Perdue, it's over.

I love making and eating fried chicken

I decided to teach my daughter how to spatchcock a bird prior to her heading off to college. (In my opinion it's the most foolproof roasting method) Let's just say that she was certain that she was about to be thoroughly embarrassed....

I made the Zuni Cafe roast chicken once, but it set off my smoke alarm wiht the high roasting temps; but it was the most delicious chicken I've ever had. It's not much of a story ...

After years of roasting chickens on a fairly regular basis (sometimes with butter tucked under the skin, sometimes with cilantro and limes stuffed in the cavity, etc.), we picked up Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food. It was a revelation in chicken-roasting! But no sooner than we found what seemed to be the ultimate method did my husband begin angling to try Heston Blumenthal's version. Is the ultimate version still out there, somewhere?

We consider roast chicken a "staple". Aromatics in the cavity, wings under and truss the legs to the butt. Pour dry sherry over all, add salt pepper and paprika and roast. It makes the most marvelous gravy...

I have cooked many a chicken. My favorite was at a football tailgate party last year. I cooked four little fryers on beer cans. I was sooo surprised at how moist the chickens turned out. Make sure that you put a potato in the top of the chicken while it is on the grill. This helps the moisture from the beer really infuse the chicken.

I roast a chicken several times a month and love using the leftovers to make stock - i can never go back to canned.

I was vegan until the day I could no longer resist the siren song of a poulet rôti in a Paris restaurant. It's been one slippery (and delicious!) slope back to being an omnivore.

When I was younger my brother and I decided to make my mother a birthday dinner from scratch. We decided on baking a chicken, because we figured that it would be hard to mess up. Well, in fact we almost burned the house down and ended up with a charcoal briquette instead of a bird.

My mom wanted an Auracana chicken after seeing them on a Martha Stewart show, so when she visited me in college she bought one from a feed store and snuck it home on the plane, hidden in a scarf around her neck. This chicken grew up with her dogs, pecked at everyone's feet, slept with the dogs, ate with the dogs, and eventually did lay some pretty blue-green eggs. In addition to her chicken feed, she also ate ground beef and scrambled eggs but always refused to eat cooked chicken.

A Dinner to Remember

I undertook a quiet approach to the crackling-glazed large bird, so lovingly roasted. The candle flickered and glowed. Warmly basted, softly brushed all over with smooth melting careful rich buttery caresses, brushed with long full licks of the brush, with little barely touching kisses of its mane. A barely audible noise, a rich fragrance of the earth, gently diffused the muted atmosphere of the amiable, dusk filled country kitchen. I made close, and with a touch of my longing hand upon that so-succulent and emboldened leg, it suddenly, joyously, released spinning droplets of hot flavrous juices at me. Airbound they flew, bursting, spurting, upwards towards the sky in delicious glorious escape. Then, dripping drizzling oozing with a glistening fullness the sweet juices puddled, lovingly hot and torpid, onto the heated vessel laying in wait for them to gather, en masse. Dinnertime, dear! I called out. And we feasted well and fully.

In a roasting rack, high off the floor of the roasting pan, stuffed with aromatics, gently salted, dried well, and skin well buttered. Then sift flour all over the buttered skin, and roast at 375 about an hour for a 3-4 pound chicken. You may raise the temp to 425 for the last 30 min to brown the skin some more.

Keep warm, deglaze the pan with a bit of dry vermouth, and serve the drippings with the sliced roast chicken.

Learned this from a Quebecois gentleman named Pierre in 1979.

Just made my first roast chicken a couple of weeks ago. I don't know why I was so intimidated by it - it was super easy to make and puts grocery story chickens to shame!

my husband makes it, i just eat it :)

i have yet to roast a chicken!

roasted lots of chickens over not so many years,

...but it was Ed Levine's desire to make the Zuni chicken that inspired me to try a new method and now my 10 inch cast iron skillet is pretty much the only pan I use to roast a nice young bird.

thanks ed, and thanks judy rodgers.

taking a chicken, season it an hour or so before, keeping it simple
hot oven, about an hour, crispy skinned, full of juice
leftovers, meat for anything, bones for stock
stock for soup, crusty bread, thank you chicken

Fried Chicken breast it is great in salads or soups.

I was in high school home alone and decided to cook a frozen chicken tender. I followed the microwave instructions on the bag exactly and what came out was a piece of cardboard that was still bloody. I threw that away and resorted to easy mac. I'm still afraid to cook meat and rely on my trusty george foreman for never failed veggie burgers.

Roast chicken always means it's the first Sunday of the month.

I slice onions to line my crock pot, sea salt two whole chickens inside and out, and set the temp on low for 10+ hours. Mmmmm...

The leftovers are recycled, rarely lasting more than 2 weeks. Pot pies, broth, soup, lunches, salads, chili, on and on.

I swear by Thomas Keller's method on Epicurious. Perfect every time (I leave off the butter and thyme) and I've passed it on to many people who love it as much as I do.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/231348

My favorite chicken story is Chicken Little. Does that count?

Oh. And then there's the story of the devil chicken my wacky dad somehow adopted when I was five years old. This was only the latest addition to a very long line of odd creatures he's taken in over the years (three racoons, various snakes, a hawk, an owl, two crows, a desert tortoise, and so on). Anyway. I passionately hated that chicken. It was mean, mean, mean. Used to chase me around the yard trying to peck my legs to shreds, or would flutter up onto my shoulders pecking at my head. One weekend, I was playing in the backyard. I couldn't go in through the back door, because my mom was mopping and waxing the floors. I couldn't go in through the front door, because my dad was spraying the rose bushes around the front porch. The chicken suddenly decided to start its torture the little girl routine. I remember climbing on top of the car to get away. Of course, it simply followed me. Finally, my dad took pity and let me in through the front door. Shortly after that the chicken was gone, donated to some new owner.

Oh. Did I mention we lived in the city? On a busy boulevard? Well, that's my dad.

The idea of raising and slaughtering my own chickens for cooking has never bothered me in the least. Baggage? I expect so.

Chicken is a real basic in our house. When I roast a chicken I add peeled, quartered potatoes to the pan and bake along with the chicken. Yummy!

My husband calls me the queen of white meat! I can make chicken come out so moist and juicy no matter which method of cooking. I try to tell him he just cooks his too long and then it is dry. I keep close watch on the cooking until it is done perfectly. In my home, I have the chicken detail but not the burgers...those I burn every time.

I was broiling chicken for a friend in college, a friend I was trying to impress with my cooking prowess and overall suave-ness. The broiler set off the smoke alarm, so I reached for the first thing I could to wave in front of the alarm. I picked up a box of wheat thins (this was the 80's) and waved it in front of the sensor. Unfortunately, it was a box of wheat thins that I had already opened, and as I waved the box, an arc of wheat thins emerged in the air, landing all over the apartment. I was finding them for months. Been leery of broilers ever since.

The first whole roast chicken I ever made was The Chicken Who Would Not Thaw. Admittedly, we should have dug it outof the freezer a little earlier, but removing the innard took pots of boiling water, a several knives, a giant saute pan, predictable bouts of tug of war that ended with limbs akimbo and the chicken on the floor, and far more time with my hand up a very cold chicken rear than feels healthy. I rubbed it in salt and herbs, stuffed it with an onion and it was heavenly.

We roast a whole chicken once a week. We call it "chicken in the oven," as in "What should we have for dinner tonight? How about chicken in the oven?"

Once upon a time in Southern California, a middle-aged mother tossed a chicken on a beer can, having seen it done on the Food Network just days before. After just a few minutes, the backyard was filled with black smoke. The back fence still has scorch marks!

The first time I roasted a chicken, it was for a dinner I invited my viola teacher to as a thanks for helping me struggle through a tough concert. I served Amanda Hesser's Arborio rice salad and sliced mangos, but we ended up waiting half an hour for the chicken. It was pretty good, but I will always remember those awkward minutes spent nibbling around the edges of our plates in my quiet, quiet kitchen.

years ago a friend was having a party at his apartment in Spanish Harlem. this was before the wave of gentrification that's currently happening. a young guy fresh into town from the South got off the subway on 116th st. into dark & unfamiliar surroundings. he was gently stopped by an old man holding a chicken wing and asked if he had a quarter. before he knew it, the old man had steered the guy around the corner of a building into an alley and now *all* of his money was politely requested. the old man then quickly slipped away, leaving his half-eaten drumstick in the hands of the young man. dazed, he was still carrying it when he walked into the party.

My husband is the King of the Broiling Pan. Our default dinner protein is chicken breast pounded flat and then seasoned, basted or breaded in whatever he thinks is a good idea at the time. Almost no time under the broiler later, we have a real meal. Amazing.

butterflied is so much easier than whole

We just moved into our new house last summer. I was roasting a chicken, but forgot to turn on the oven fan. All of a sudden every smoke alarm in the house went off. It was deafening. We opened all the windows and doors and turned on all the ceiling fans in addition to the oven fan. Still the alarms could not be stopped. Soon neighbors started coming over to see what was wrong. It was a very dramatic way to meet our new neighbors.

I have 9 chickens that my kids adore...the chickens would be mortified to know I am entering a chicken COOKbook contest:-)

when my daughter was 3, she was eating chicken for dinner and asked me "What's the difference between food chicken and animal chicken?" I paused and said "they're the same thing." Fortunately, the carnivore genes were strong and she's still a happy meat eater

Cold roast chicken is my favorite food. Yum!

Roast Chicken was one of the first "grown up" meals I learned to make when I moved out of my parents' house into an apartment in 1979. I didn't have much in the way of cookware or kitchen, but I had an old cast aluminum roasting pan and an oven. I would rub butter all over the bird, then salt it. I put an apple and an onion in the cavity, tuck the wings under, and pop it into the oven. The smell filled the two tiny little rooms. I would sit in my only upholstered chair and read, inhaling deeply, until I just had to take it out of the oven. I have no idea how I knew when it was done; I am sure I didn't have a meat thermometer back then. But it was always perfect. It made me feel like I was more than just "scraping along" - I was living!

My chicken story is the libretto for the opera La Pulcina Piccola! You could look it up!

Used to be really bad at roasting chicken either leaving it raw enough to kill everybody at the table or roasting for so long that the bones were the only edible part. My epiphany came from Richard Sax and now I turn out perfect roast chicken and the story is the prep. My wife just shakes her head at my compulsiveness at sterilizing everything in sight after the chicken goes in the oven and scrubbing as though I'm going to perform surgery.

When I was growing up in the '50s in the wilds of Brooklyn, Friday night was always the night for roast chicken. We weren't religious but for some reason I knew it was shabbos (sabbath) and it was a special night.
I would spend the afternoon helping my mother - I would grind up chicken livers, eggs, and bread crumbs to make her chopped liver using a cast iron grinder that we clipped to the edge of the table. Sometimes she would make her own blintzes - she would cover the dining room table with striped kitchen towels, make her blintz pancakes, then let them dry out on the towels. Then we would fill them with cheese or fruit, fold them up, and fry them in a skillet when we were ready to sit down to eat.
It was a night that my father came home from work a bit earlier than usual - he was an auto mechanic working in his own gas station garage - and we would all sit down to dinner together. He worked six days a week and this was the only night we would all be able to sit down together at a meal.
I've never had anyone duplicate a roast chicken dinner like that. Memory just makes everything served that much sweeter.

I love making chicken salad tostadas from scratch with hot sauce and sour cream to top it....very yummy. I'm making myself hungry just talking about it...lol.

Chicken Chinese style is great- get a really fresh quality chicken(Murray's chicken); steam in a wok; cut up into pieces and serve with dipping sauce of soy sauce, grated ginger, green onions.

Last year, in an attempt to assuage a guy friend's hurt feelings over an unrequited love, 3 of us rounded him up and talked him through why he wasn't getting the right signals and what he could do to make himself more attractive to her. my friend had suggested that yes, playing the guitar could be one way to her heart, but that these days, the greatest way to a girl's heart was to show how well you could cook. I agreed wholeheartedly and said how it was incredibly sexy when a guy knew how to cook well. We all talked late into the night, and by the end, I knew for sure that I'd acquired a bit of strep throat.

The next day, I woke up, and of course, my throat was thrashed and horribly infected, and I lamented my woes to my friend over instant messenger. Three hours later, I got a surprise knock on the door, and here he was, with a large tupperware tub in hand, full of homemade chicken rice soup. He'd made the stock completely from scratch, chosen rice over noodles (because he knew I liked rice more), put only the vegetables I liked to my surprise, and loaded it with tons of garlic and spices to my liking! Three days later, we started dating and we're still very much together and in love (and yes, we cook together a lot!). To this day, we talk about how I was courted with homemade chicken soup!

(Is that a chicken story? =D)

I like roasting chickens with slivers of lemon underneath the skin. They are like chicken candy.

I roast chickens once a week.

The smell of a roast chicken is one of my favorite smells.

It's one of the easiest, most delicious ways to prepare chicken IMHO.

My husband now one is chicken with a beer can, it is really good and keeps it moist

When I cooked my first chicken, I didn't realize there was a bag inside of the chicken with the heart and liver. I stuffed the chicken bag and all and cooked it.

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to make the best chicken dish - a type of biryani with tomato paste, cardamom, cloves, turmeric and basmati rice. I used to always look forward to the weekend to visit her, so I can stuff myself full of this dish.

My favourite childhood chicken dish was chicken and sliders--known as chicken and dumplings to those without a French-Canadian background. Simply amazing. So soothing and so delicious, and, as I learned last weekend when I made it myself, completely worth the effort.

I cooked a rabbit in a mustard-wine sauce, but told my youngest it was chicken. She loved it, asked for 2nds, and continues to this day to ask for the "mustardy chicken".

Well, there was the time I had a pair of chickens on the outdoor gas rotisserie, and I was indoors, puttering with the rest of the meal in the kitchen. When it was just about time for the chickens to be done, I went out and -- oops, the gas had run out at some point in the cooking process. Dinner was a bit late that night!

One of my favorite stories is when my Auntie Muff (yes, you read that right...), wanted to cook her first chicken after she married my uncle and they moved from the city to our family ranch in Washington State.

Early one day she went to the chicken coop and grabbed a chicken, wrung it's neck, chopped off the head and plucked it which was a HUGE job for a city girl.

She took the chicken into the ranch house kitchen and put it in a pot of water with onions and carrots. She cooked that bird all day long until my uncle came in from the fields.

She proudly placed the cooked chicken in front of my uncle who tried to cut into it but was having trouble. After a couple of minutes of trying to cut the thing up he realized that she had killed an old rooster and no matter how long she would have cooked that thing it was never going to be soft.

I laugh at that story all of the time but I will tell you that my Auntie Muff is one of the best country cooks around now.

I'm excited to try anew recipe for a Brick Spatchcocked Chicken but first I'm going to the building supply store and buying a round stepping stone that will fit perfectly into my favorite cast iron skillet.

I've never tried to cook a whole chicken, but I'd love to try this book's recipe for my first time! Then I could tell a story. ; )

like smoking it

I have fond memories of my Polish grandmothers incredible chicken noodle soup, with homemade noodles, of course my grandmother would buy her chickens live, and "dispatch" them in the backyard. EWWW!

I made a delicious roast chicken from a recipe on Epicurious. It was simply seasoned and roasted with high heat. It was delicious, but it took two days of soaking to clean the pan.

On a trip to Hana, Hawaii, we c ould not get into restaurant, ended up buying a rotisserie chicken and ate it outside looking at the lush surroundings and water. I'll never forget that meal.

I'm sooooo lonesome for Kenny Rogers' Roasted Chicken!!!!!!
His was sooooo much better than mine ever is.

When I was in kindergarten I said I wanted to live on a farm and raise chickens. Today, I don't live on a farm but I will soon be raising chickens in my backyard. I love everything about chickens, especially eggs. I'm looking forward to those eggs.

I don't seem to have chicken disasters, although I have plenty with other foods.

Roast chicken a la Thomas Keller is one of my favorite comfort foods, with a little wine-enhanced pan gravy over mashed potatoes or rice. I modify Chef Keller's recipe slightly -- I super-heat my cast-iron skillet before I place the bird inside, which insures browning on the downside as well.

My southern-boy husband's fave is fried chicken, including oven-fried chicken. Laurie Colwin's crunchy-crusted baked chicken is great, as is Amanda Hesser's oven-fried chicken.

Growing up, our family ate chicken in one form or another probably 4-5x a week (paternal grandfather had heart trouble, so my dad didn't want to eat much red meat)...relatives used to joke that we were going to sprout feathers. I was 5 or 6 and we were on vacation when we spotted a bird sitting on a fence, and he was happily chirping away. My mom wondered aloud what kind of bird it was, and I responded with "It's a red-breasted chicken!" Turns out it was merely a Robin, but I think my parents realized they were giving us an awful lot of chicken.
Almost (ahem-I said ALMOST) four decades later, my folks still quote that line back to me. And I still roast a great chicken! :-)

My Dad made the best southern fried chicken. Although he used every pan in the house to do it.

thank you..great..still trying to get fried chicken down but i will

I have never cooked a whole chicken. Maybe I should try.

My chicken story is how much I miss my father's chickens....he recently moved into an apartment, and had to get rid of his chickens....I miss those eggs more than I can describe....they were my favorite food, now I'm on a mission to find an equal quality egg!

Once I offered a girl I didn't know very well half of my chicken sandwich. She declined saying that she was a vegetarian. I looked away for a minute and when I looked back she was munching on the other half.

We've been best friends ever since, even if she still doesn't care for chicken on the bone, or as we call it "chicken on the chicken."

When I think of chicken, I think of the year when we ate little but. Living in a downtown area on a starving student budget, we would stock up on cheap frozen chicken and broccoli, and 10 cent boxes of macaroni and cheese. Everything got thrown together and eaten, and the meal was repeated, and repeated and repeated... without even the benefit of garlic or pepper thanks to a few picky eaters.

While I'm nostalgic for the shopping and painstaking (a meal to impress other starving students! something not just out of a box!) preparation, the thought of eating the dish makes me a little nauseous.

Shortly after I moved into my last apartment, I inaugurated the oven by roasting a chicken. I didn't realize at the time that the actual oven temp hit 45 degrees hotter than I set it to. I carbonized all the veggies in the bottom of the pan and ... well, my bird definitely had a crispy crust. I figured I'd miscalculated something. It took some ruined scones and baguettes the following week to make me realize that maybe I needed to invest in an oven thermometer.

A Chicken Story.
Prologue: In the beginning, there was a chicken (or was it an egg?), but it knew not its destiny to become a delicious roast.
Chapter One, in which a chicken is cooked: I bought and cooked this chicken, with lemons, garlic, and fresh thyme. It was eaten, and it was good. The End.
Epilogue: I did it again. And again, it was good.

I love roasting chix 1x week I usually just put onion, lemon and small potatoesa round the chix and cokk for 1 and a half hours. Easiest comfort food to make and always comes out good.

The first time I roasted a chicken (for company, no less), I got on the phone with a friend of mine who was older and wiser in all things food and drink. It was a painful step by step process for this idiot, made all the more hilarious on the other side of the phone when my friend told me I needed to spread the legs as wide as possible, and reach inside. Little did her mother, who happened to be near her, know that she was having me look for giblets!

I've seen people standing in line at Sam's Club for as long as 45 minutes or so waiting for roasted chickens to come out.

My favorite chicken dish growing up was a masterpiece of convenience cooking, "Chicken that makes it's own gravy".
Chicken pieces smothered in canned cream of mushroom soup and velveeta cheese, baked and served over egg noodles. I should deny ever even hearing of such a dish, but as a kid I loved it.

i like chicken... surely that counts!