Dateline: February 22, 2021 Rotisserie Chicken with Roasted Vegetables

I had a very cute small chicken that needed cooking.  I wanted rotisserie chicken, so I stuffed the cavity with some fennel stalks and fronds and a tiny half onion left over from another night.  For the vegetation over which the chicken would slowly rotate I had some cubed up rutabaga, aforementioned fennel, onion, brussel sprouts, red bell peppers, carrots, and a couple of small white potatoes.  

Everything got chopped up and doused with olive oil, garlic, red finger pepper, and a chopped up preserved lime.  Yes, a preserved lime.  I tried out preserving citrus fruits other than lemons in saline solution and have limes and oranges sitting in the fridge.  The limes add a level of sourness that the preserved lemons do not.  In judicious amounts it will work.  Because I preserve mostly Meyer Lemons, the sharpness of the acid was a bit of a surprise when I tasted a tiny piece before dumping it into the veggies.  In the finished product, it did not overpower at all, in fact, it seemed to be a factor that pulled everything together a bit tighter.

As I was prepping things for the meal, I was also making chicken stock.  I read an article in Cook's Illustrated that discussed the differences between bone broth and stock.  Who knew, I have been making bone broth for 30+ years, OG hipster here!  It seems that the big difference is the amount of collagen that is present in the finished product.  Bone broth has lots of it, stock, not so much.  How do you know if you have collagen in your stock/broth, let it cool after cooking.  Does it set up, and look like Jello, you have a lot of collagen in that batch.  You can always cheat and add powdered collagen to a finished product to duplicate that particular umami-ness.

As a music history professor would tell us, "Label that digression in your notes".  Back to the chicken.

I rubbed it with some oil, and salted and peppered it, ran the skewer through, tightened the prongs and poked the end through the hole in the back of the oven.  I never had a built in rotisserie in an oven before, I will never be without one going forward.  I started the temp at 400° F for about 35 minutes, or until you could smell the chicken.  I lowered the temp to 350° F and added a cup of chicken bone broth to the sheet pan below.  Set the timer for another 30 minutes, and voila!   Chicken-y nirvana with unctuous roasted veggies with a touch of char to them.  It hit every bell for me!

Roasted Veggies

Rotisserie Chicken