Roast Chicken Recipe, How to Make Sunday Dinner When You Feel Lazy

Recipe for Sunday Dinner Roast Chicken is at the bottom of this post. Please scroll down.

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Lazy Sunday Roast Chicken Recipe

Do not set your alarm. Wake up late on Sunday morning. Pull your unwashed hair into a loose ponytail, forego contact lenses for glasses, and stay in your pajamas all day. Open every window in your house and turn up '80s music without any regard for your neighbors.

Prep Time5 minutes mins

Total Time1 hour hr

Total Time1 hour hr 5 minutes mins

Course: Main Course

Cuisine: American, French

Keyword: roast chicken

Servings: 4 servings

Cook ModePrevent your screen from going dark

Ingredients

• 1 3-4 pound chicken
• sea salt plus black pepper, optional
• 5-6 cloves garlic peeled and lightly smashed
• 1 lemon cut in half
• 3 stalks celery
• 3 carrots peeled

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 450ªF.
• Wash and prep a 3-4 pound chicken, cutting away any excess fat and plucking off remnant feather pieces. Pat the chicken dry all over and inside.
• Sprinkle the cavity with kosher salt. Place 5-6 cloves of garlic, lightly smashed with the side of a knife and one lemon, cut in half, inside the cavity. Sprinkle the outside of the chicken all over generously with salt, and pepper if using.
• If you're motivated, tie the legs together, but I hardly have enough time to blog, let alone truss a bird. Place 3 stalks of celery and 3 peeled carrots in the bottom of a roasting pan to serve as a "rack." Put the chicken breast-side up on the carrots and celery. Pull the wing tips back and tuck behind and underneath.
• Roast the chicken for about an hour or until done. I may fiddle with my computer with chicken juice on my hands, but I do have a strange obsession with using a thermometer to roast until a proper "safe" temperature.
• Let the chicken rest for 15 minutes before serving.
• Save roasted chicken bones, carrots, and celery to make chicken broth next time you need therapy.

when you make this recipe, let us know!Mention @TheDelicious or tag #thedeliciousmademedoit!

Every blog has at least one.

Some blogs, not so creative, have more.

It’s the post where you’re so deeply emotional about something, yet so uninspired to write that you reduce yourself to simply posting the lyrics of a song that moves you in the same way.

I am doing that today.

This is that post.

Hopefully, this will be the only post.

I’m not doing it because I’m lazy. Nor am I uninspired. Quite the opposite, in fact. I'm so overwhelmed by this feeling of I-can't-explain-it-even-now that any feeble attempt to express myself in my personal prosaic form would simply detract from the tragic beauty of...roasting a chicken on a Sunday afternoon.

See what I mean? Roasting a chicken on Sunday afternoon sounds so mundane, so very mechanical. I must turn to poetry. I must break out in song.

I must bite lyrics from General Public because I'm a blogger, not a goddamned poet.

I don't know when to start or when to stop
My luck's like a button
I can't stop pushing it
My head feels light
But I'm still in the dark
Seems like without tenderness there's something missing

Tenderness
Where is the
Tenderness
Where is it?

I don't know where I am but I know I don't like it
Open my mouth and out pops something spiteful
Words are so cheap, but they can turn out expensive
Words like conviction can turn into a sentence

Tenderness
Where is the
Tenderness
Where is it?

The '80s was the Sunday afternoon soundtrack playing in the background as I made my first foray into the kitchen in a very long time. When iTunes flipped from It's My Life (the original version by Talk Talk, not the surprisingly decent cover by No Doubt) to Tenderness, I was elbow deep all up inside a large chicken. I was singing along as I usually do, but after the first verse, I stopped. For the first time, I was actually listening to the words, not just hearing them.

The curse of the '80s is that the music was so upbeat and "happy" in tempo and melody that the meaning of the words was lost. "Words are so cheap, but they can turn out expensive" not only plucked my aural neurons, but they were registering somewhere deeper, and I'm not talking about the body cavity of a raw chicken. I was stunned.

In a maneuver that would have set the Health and Safety Department's sirens clanging, I yanked my hands out of the chicken, leaped in two death-defying bounds from the kitchen to my living room with chicken juice running dangerously down the backs of my forearms, and fumbled desperately with a mouse and a menu bar to find the Repeat feature on iTunes. Somehow I had managed to keep salmonella away from my laptop.

Though I feel stupid admitting outblog that song lyrics were affecting me so much, they were. So many areas of my life were being represented by that afternoon, underscored by a silly song from the '80s. My full-time job was racing ahead at such an impossible speed that I couldn't live my life. I could hardly keep up with blogging, and for some reason, what had once been a quiet hour or two of therapeutic release had deteriorated into a chore more stressful than a job. Books were stacking up on my nightstand, bindings unbroken. Magazines, into which I usually tear the minute I yank them of my mailbox, lay in piles under my coffee table still in their plastic packaging. When once I used to see at least one member of my family once a week, at least have dinner with everyone together twice a month, I barely had time for a quick hello via phone.

My life was spinning out of control, but every minute I woke up earlier, every injection of caffeine to stay up later in an effort to take control was like grasping more tightly onto one of those water worm toys. The more tightly I gripped, the faster it slipped out of my grasp. I was cranky. Stressed. Depressed. Utterly unhappy, I was spewing bitterness in every word I wrote or spoke. I wasn't myself.

Tenderness. Where is the tenderness?

It was right there, resting on my cutting board.