Leila's Commonplace Blog: Spiced Chicken Melee

I've been threatening to try a recipe in which you roast six chickens at once in a giant roasting pan. Now the chickens are prepped and marinating.

Because I combined the internet recipe with my own favorite spiced chicken recipe (adapted from Gourmet/Epicurious), the hassle factor was higher than it would have been. Rubbing those chickens with the gloppy marinade was icky. The flavor is worth it, I think.

My roaster must be extra large, because the chickens don't fit in snugly, they have plenty of room to loll around. However that also means they have plenty more room to cook - if they were wedged in on top of each other, they wouldn't cook evenly. Tomorrow I'll debrief here on how it went.

See flickr for more pictures of the process.

And afterward I cleaned and sanitized my kitchen counters and sink. The place reeks of chlorine but boy are we clean at our house. Tonight after I get the roasted chickens out of the oven, I'll have to cut them up, then sanitize all the surfaces again. Will I even want to go to a party after all that?

Update. It's not going well. The chickens were apparently just not defrosted well enough (I'd bought them early in the week, started defrosting them in the fridge on Thursday, trying so hard to follow all the safety recommendations. !#@[email protected]). They've been in over two hours and I'm not sure they're done yet. And we're late. P***.

This really is a hassle. The recipe is NOT as easy as the chef makes it sound.

Update next day. NEVER AGAIN. I will not detail here the enormous hassle and trouble of getting the damn chickens to cook. And some parts were still underdone, curses. My mother-in-law was enormously helpful during the whole process, including hacking up the chickens with me at the end. We were an hour late to the party.

The original spiced chicken recipe as I've adapted it from Gourmet uses pre-cut chicken parts; it can be made with about ten pounds of chicken, to serve twelve supposedly, but at a potluck it's plenty of chicken. My mother-in-law sensibly suggests that I just use the original recipe.

Never again will I attempt to roast six chickens at once. It is simply not worth the trouble to me.