roast chicken with dijon sauce

This is a story about closets, and how messy they can get when you spend a year caring for a baby and put things away so haphazardly that one day, they wont close at all and you beg your in-laws to watch the baby for a few hours so you can go to a bar get some sleep clean out your closets. Yep, things can get that bad. But if I hadnt cleaned out this closet, I wouldnt have snuck off to the bedroom for a while with an old issue of Gourmet I discovered in a totebag, the French Bistro one, and found a chicken recipe I couldnt believe I hadnt made yet. That I had to make immediately.

So its not just a story about closets, phew. Its also a story about butchering, and I do mean in the wow-you-really-butchered that sense, in that one of my goals in the kitchen has been to learn how to take apart a whole chicken. There are so many reasons I want to be able to do this: it saves money, it makes us more self-sufficient in the kitchen and its easier to buy clean and local chickens, which are mostly sold whole. And its efficient: my husband likes white meat, I like dark meat, the Mup pet aint picky and we all agree that chicken stock made from the backs and etceteras of whole chickens (I keep them in the freezer until Ive amassed enough for stock) is superior in every way. Look how far that little bird goes! So, with the guidance of another Gourmet production, this video from Ian Knauer (who brought us these, by the way), this was my first effort. Which explains why it looks so butchered. Hey, it only gets better from here, promise.

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