[Inez] Christmas hen

I was browsing Tastespotting before heading home for Christmas, and I kept seeing these a

amazing looking roast chickens. If you know me much, you know it's not often I crave meat of any kind, but these chickens were just beautiful. One of them was a butter roasted chicken, photographed with roasted vegetables and a sprig of rosemary balanced across its fat roasted middle. My family doesn't do the Christmas goose or the Christmas ham, but I wanted that Christmas hen.

The recipe is a bit demanding in that you have to baste the chicken every 8 minutes for an hour and 15 minutes and turn it several times, but as long as you simply think of that as an excuse to admire the bird you will soon be eating, it's really not so bad. It's basically a chicken, slathered in butter, stuffed with lemon, rosemary and salt, rubbed with more lemon, rosemary and salt, and basted frequently while cooked uncovered.

The recipe I followed, linked to above, calls for white wine in the basting sauce, but of course my house has no wine to speak of. I used a bit of rice wine vinegar, a bit of cider vinegar, and more water than called for. I think it turned out just fine.

I roasted it with onions, carrots, potatoes, and yams, but oddly they didn't cook all the way through! I think it would be worth the extra hassle to stir the root vegetables a couple of times and maybe cover them with tinfoil for half an hour or so.

I also roasted up some asparagus (rolled in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, and roasted for about 10 minutes at 400 or so -- thank you to Alex for my now favorite way to cook asparagus) to go with the chicken. With the lemon from inside the hen squeezed all over it, it was delish.

The chicken, thanks to all the basting, was some of the juiciest, most tender chicken I've ever had. The only modification I would make to the recipe is rather than rubbing it with rosemary-lemon zest rock salt halfway through the cooking, I think I would rub the flavored salt under the skin. I would have liked to have the rosemary flavor infused in the meat a little more. In all, though, a delicious hen.