How To: Roast a Chicken (If You're an Idiot)

Our roasted chicken. The skin is very crispy and salty. Meat was juicy and awesome. Just over 3 pounds or so. Read on to see how we did it.

Rinse the chicken with cold water.

Here\'s the key to making this work. Dry the bird when you\'re done rinsing it. We\'re gonna roast this bad boy, not steam it. Don\'t go shoving lemons or cans of beer or other crap into that cavity. We\'re going simple here. Pat the skin dry and make sure the inside isn\'t holding water.

We used salt, pepper, and some thyme. If you don\'t have thyme - who cares? The whole point of this is that it\'s simple. You only have salt? Use salt.

Salt, pepper, thyme. How much? However much you like. You\'re going to want to liberally sprinkle the outside of the chicken so eyeball it. You can\'t really go wrong here.

Tuck in the wings. Here, the chicken is breast side down. We\'re going to bend that end of the wing behind itself sort of - you\'ll be pushing it into an un-natural position.

Here\'s the wing tip - getting ready to bend it toward the camera.

Wing tucked.

Um, we didn\'t have any butcher\'s sting. So we flew by the seat of our pants and seriously grabbed thread for sewing. We\'re not cooking for the queen here, folks. So, chicken is breast side up. Legs currently unlady-like. We basically made her cross her legs at the ankles and tied them together. Doing this is going to make your chicken cook more evenly.

Chicken. Rinsed, patted dry, almost dressed for dinner.

Sprinkled/rubbed in our salt, pepper, and thyme.

Covered. If you\'re using grains of salt, maybe don\'t use quite as much.

Here\'s our chicken in our $4 roasting pan from IKEA. Seriously. Again, not cooking for royalty.

An hour later, take the temperature of the chicken. We check the breast and thigh and *cough* cook to government standards. Let the lady rest a good 10 minutes out of the oven before you take off a leg. However, we almost always immediately remove a wing and eat that. It\'s too salty-crispy to resist. Make sure the juices run clear when you cut off the leg - otherwise, pop it back in the oven.