Or: The most useful kitchen trick there is

A roasted chicken is easy, tasty, and the pathway to many other culinary delights – think homemade soup, great chicken salad sandwiches, or an easy chicken burrito. It also looks splendid on a platter.

A couple of caveats: I can’t cut up a roasted chicken so that it looks pretty. I suggest you go online and find a step-by-step guide to carving a cooked bird. Have your dad or brother show you (I don’t know why, but carving is a guy thing). Or just buy a cut up whole chicken and roast that.

Second caveat: If you buy a whole chicken in advance and put it in your freezer, you have to give it at least three days to thaw completely. Books may say one or two, but once those puppies are frozen solid, you’re days away from cooking. Better to buy the bird the day or day before you want to cook it.

Now you’re ready to start.

Unwrap the chicken in the sink and toss the packaging. If you are using a whole bird, look inside both cavities and pull out the package of giblets (that’s the internal organs) and the neck if it’s there. Sometimes, they don’t put the neck in any more. You can throw these away, or save them in a zipper bag in the freezer for when you make soup. Next, pull off any obvious fat globs near the neck and tail cavities. These you can throw away unless you feel something Jewish coming on and feel a penchant for making my grandmother’s chopped liver. Or matzoh balls made with real schmalz.

Rinse the bird and pat it dry.

You need to find a roasting pan, or at the very least, a 9×13 baking dish. If you have a roasting rack, set it up in the pan. If you don’t, you need something to get the bird off the bottom of the pan. The tasty option is to peel a couple carrots and cut them into chunks – a couple inches long, maybe halved if they’re big; coarsely chop an onion; halve some baby potatoes or chop up some larger ones. You want all the pieces of veggies to be about the same size. You can also thickly slice a lemon or two and/or an orange and either add this to the veggies or use the citrus alone to set the chicken on. If you are using veggies and citrus, I recommend lemon only. Oranges don’t really go with spuds. You can also use sweet potatoes and winter squash (in which case, I’d recommend oranges as the citrus). Toss all the vegetable matter with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Add a small sprig of thyme and/or rosemary, chopped fine. Put this all in the bottom of your baking or roasting pan.

Halve a lemon or quarter an orange. Shove the bits into the chicken. Using citrus inside the bird helps to flavor it and keep it moist. Put the bird on the roasting rack – edible or metal, whichever you’ve chosen, breast side up.

Rub the bird with a little olive oil, and generously salt and pepper it. Put it in a preheated 450 degree oven for 20 minutes. Then lower the temperature to 350 and continue to roast for another 40-60 minutes. You can check the chicken every 20 minutes or so and see if you need to baste it – you bet a turkey baster, suck up some of the juices in the bottom of the pan and just spray them over the bird. If you don’t have a turkey baster, take the pan out of the oven and use a big spoon to pour the juices over it. You want to check the temperature of the bird after about an hour using an instant read thermometer stuck in the thickest part of the chicken thigh. It should be 165 degrees when you take it out of the oven. If it’s not, put it back in for another 20 minutes and check again. If the skin is getting too dark, loosely cover it with foil before putting it back in the oven.

When it’s reached 165 degrees, take it out, cover with foil if it isn’t already, and let it sit for 10-15 minutes. This allows the juices to redistribute.

Put the whole bird on the platter and surround it with the roasted veggies. With a salad, a loaf of bread and some wine, you have a really nice looking dinner.

Should you decide to use a cut up bird rather than a whole one, or just breasts and thighs or whatever, roast them on a bed of vegetables, oil them, salt/pepper them. Start them out at 450 degrees for 20 minutes, lower the temperature, and then cook for another 40. Unless they’re whopping big breasts, the chicken should be done after an hour. Still, check it with your thermometer. Presentation is the same without the worry of how the heck you’ll cut it up.

When you are done with whatever meat you’re going to eat from the whole bird, save the carcass – any bones not chewed upon by a mouth. The next lesson is how to make a chicken soup any Jewish mother would be proud of.