Roasted Chicken and Mushroom Stuffing

As you know, we had a blizzard a few days ago.  Being stuck in the house with limited food items and no way to get more ingredients definitely helps creativity.  On Sunday night I looked into my freezer and thought, "What the heck am I going to make tomorrow?"  In the freezer I had some Italian sausage, but no tomato sauce.  Next, a huge steak, but no way can we use the grill.  Next, a whole chicken, "ok this may work".  I pulled the chicken out without a plan and left it on the counter to defrost. 

Monday morning, after breakfast, I sat with my mother-in-law, Gini, and tried to figure out what we wanted to make with it.  We looked through many cookbooks and found lots of interesting ideas, but not many that we could implement with our limited items.  Finally, we went to my go-to cookbook, my mothers 10th Edition Fanny Farmer Cookbook originally written in 1896.  This book was my mother's before she was married, when her last name was still Joel.  Its completely yellowed, with its pages crumbling and has funny notes in it like, "don't use diet sugar!", on the sugar cookie page and "don't use our oven" in the front.  On page 217 we found instructions on making a Roast Chicken, not very complex, just a few pointers. 

1) Preheat oven to 325°.  2) Remove innards, clean Chicken, put on roasting rack in pan.  3) Rub with 2 Tbsp melted Butter, then Salt and Pepper. 4) Loosely cover in foil, remove when 30 minutes remain.  5) Bake 3 ½ hours, until drum stick joint moves easily.

Under the chicken recipe it mentioned some stuffing ideas, one was Savory Mushroom Stuffing.  This gave us some ideas.  We didnt follow the recipe but used it as an inspiration.  We had a box of mushrooms, some celery, an onion, fresh herbs growing on the window sill.  A small catch is that Gini is Gluten-Free.  I looked around and found some GF English Muffins in the freezer, "that will work".  In a sauté pan I melted about 1 Tbsp of Butter and sautéd the mushrooms, the put them aside.  In the same pan I melted another Tbsp of butter and sautéd the onion and celery, I added the garlic at the end.  Once those were cooked I added the bread, mushrooms, the leaves of four stalks of fresh thyme and 1/4 cup chicken broth.  I mixed it all together and let cook for about a minute.  I stuffed the chicken, and put the extra stuffing under the rack in the pan.  The recipe had said to truss the chicken but I did not have any string.  Gini cut slits in the extra skin of the cavity and pulled it over and inserted the drum stick heads into the slits.  I thought that was pretty innovative.

We put the chicken in the oven and waited... 3 hours...  We had also put a tray of  Potatoes Au Gratin in the oven.  About 2 1/2 hours in the oven started smoking like crazy.  At first we thought it was the chicken pan so we put some additional chicken broth in.  That didnt help so we took the extra stuffing out of the chicken pan, thinking that was the problem.  That also didnt help, then we realized it was the potatoes dripping cheese.  Oops. 

When we pulled the stuffing out we were going to throw it away thinking it had gotten burnt, since it was quite dark.  Gini decided to taste it.  "Oh my God!  This is amazing!", said Gini.  I tasted it too and Oh my God!  I dont really have words to describe the amazingness of it.  It was earthy and rich and decadent.  Next time I won't bother stuffing the chicken with it at all, I will put it all on the bottom and let the chicken drippings do their job. 

Once we sat down to dinner we could not believe how good the chicken was as well.  When you bit into it the juice filled your mouth and to eat it with the stuffing and pan drippings was to die for.  I will definitely make this again.  You will not be disappointed by it.  Happy eating!