one man's trash is another man's treasure

This morning, I woke up, and my mission was clear. I needed to roast some chicken and eat a leg of it for lunch along with a salad of baby spinach, marinated artichokes, slivers of roasted red peppers, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, and dried cranberries. You do not ignore a mission like this, especially not when you know that this lunch will be approximately the only good thing to happen to you over the course of the imminent workday.

The beautiful thing about roasting poultry is that it is extremely easy, and once you are done with the roasting, you happen to be in a very good position to make something that tastes like something you would eat at a nice restaurant with handsome and well-mannered waiters in addition to 15-dollar glasses of Petit Syrah. Yes, you guessed it! I am talking about gravy. And what makes this gravy-yielding technique even more wonderful is that cleaning my roasting pan would have been ten times more difficult if I had had to try to get all those brown bits off with a sponge and dish soap.

However, you really cannot extend the same logic / apply the same approach to every situation in which you find little brown bits clinging to a surface. When in doubt, use your brain. Or call me. Or ask WikiAnswers; they seem to know a lot. That could be decently funny though: imagine scanning the menu at your favorite restaurant and seeing, "Grilled rack of lamb with reduction of red wine and residue from last night's dinner plates." An avant-garde restaurant in Boulder, Colorado once had such a menu offering and only one out of six food critics who reviewed the otherwise irreproachable eatery pronounced the entree to even be edible!

Many people derive a certain pleasure from watching their gravy reduce down until it is about as thick as Greek yogurt. I realize that I'm not into that. I prefer cooking it down until it is thick enough to be called a gravy by some, but also thin enough to be called a jus by others. (Just so I don't mislead anyone, among a sample of 100 study participants, it was in fact found that only 15 participants used the word "gravy" in their description of what they saw; the other 85 used the word "jus.")

I'm actually not sure what I'm going to do with my gravy-jus. I could always pour it straight over a nice hunk of the chicken I roasted this morning, but I could also whisk some cream into it over the stove and then pour it over a nice hunk of the chicken I roasted. Or I could saute a nice mix of wild mushrooms in a saucepan, pour some of the gravy-jus in, let it cook down a bit, and serve alongside a small, tender steak. Or I could saute a nice mix of wild mushrooms in a saucepan, pour some of the gravy-jus in, whisk some cream into it, and dump the creamy mushroomy chickeny goodness over a plate of fresh pasta. Ooh. Mmm. I think I will stop there, because that one sounds like a winner.

Simple Roast Chicken with Gravy-Jus

Note: This is not a very precise recipe, but before you start badmouthing the blog, please understand that roasting chicken is not like running a DNA microassay. Trust me, it's okay to let yourself relax here.

-ingredients-
Some chicken (legs, breasts, or if you are feeling like a rockstar, the whole bird)
Some herb(s) (I used dry thyme, but rosemary is quite nice with chicken too)
Some olive oil
Some low sodium chicken broth (the amount really depends on the size of your roasting pan – just keep pouring until all brown bits are concealed and the broth is about 1 cm deep) – for my 9x13 roasting pan, I used approx. 2/3 cup
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon flour
Some pinches of salt for the chicken
Some pinches of salt for the gravy-jus (this amount depends on the amount of chicken broth you are using, of course) – for my 2/3 cup of broth, I threw in about 2 big pinches

-preparation-

Phase 1: Roast your chicken. (if you're in rockstar mode and are doing a whole bird, i'd recommend taking a pointer or two from Martha)

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Trim the chicken of any excess fat and rinse it under cold water. Pat dry with paper towels.
3. Put the chicken in your roasting pan and coat with olive oil. Season generously with salt and pepper on both sides, and also give both sides a good sprinkle of whatever herb(s) you are using.
4. Cook chicken in your 400-degree oven for about 25 minutes. Then reduce the temperature to 350 and cook for another 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, stick a knife in the chicken. If the juices run clear, your chicken is done.
*At this point, if you are me, you will put one leg of the chicken in a container and the rest in your refrigerator. You will leave the roasting pan with its brown bits in the oven, because you are late for work. You will then grab your chicken leg, along with some greens, and you will rush downstairs, where your cab should be waiting for you. Or so you hope.

Phase 2: Make your gravy-jus.

1. After you've taken the chicken out of the pan, pour in some chicken broth, and use a plastic or wooden spatula to scrape all of the brown bits off the surface of the pan.
2. Put the panful of broth with brown bits suspended into your 350-degree oven. Let it sit in there for a few minutes, then remove the pan. (If you aren't me and you didn't leave the pan to ist in your oven all day and you were able to easily scrape all the brown bits off of the pan, skip this step.)
3. Pour the broth and brown bits into a saucepan; bring to simmer.
4. Whisk in 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of flour. Season with salt and pepper.
5. Allow the broth to reduce down for about 5 minutes until slightly thickened, whisking occasionally.











Picture: Ready to reduce.













Picture: We're almost there.