Dear friend,
Despite the fact that I run an online cooking school, I regularly commit what some might consider fairly serious culinary sins. The chief sin is perhaps when I take the packaging off of a frozen chicken, plop the (still frozen) bird onto a baking sheet, drizzle it with olive oil (maybe) and sprinkle it with salt (maybe).
Then I put it straight into the oven.
This chicken represents the difference, at times, between feeding people and not feeding people.
What temperature you ask? I don’t know. I simply turn the dial with a flick of optimism. (I know enough about a completely frozen chicken to know it can’t be cooked too hot, too quickly). Given the fact that it’s still basically an ice-cube, I aim for a low-ish temperature so that the bird can thaw before the outside roasts.
Can I tell you something else?
It’s always fine. Perhaps not the moistest preparation, or the most seasoned, or the best. But a roasted chicken is almost always redeemable; I turn it into something wonderful. Perfection be damned.
Seven and a half years into running our little cooking school, I have a fairly good grasp on how people see from-scratch cooking. Repetitive (yes). Relentless (yes).
Complicated (no). Stop it with the complicated.
So let’s drop the pretense, let go of being too precious, and get to work being awesome in the kitchen.
Let’s take that completely frozen chicken and make it delicious (and simple), ten different ways.
Eat it, straight up.
Pick all the meat off the bones and make chicken salad.
Pick all the meat off the bones and turn it into chicken pad Thai.
Simmer the carcass and leftover bones and bits into stock.
Pick all the meat off the bones and turn it into chicken and dumplings soup.
Throw a bunch of potatoes, carrots, onions, or cauliflower florets onto the baking tray with the chicken and let them cook in the chicken juices.
Serve the roasted chicken drizzled in balsamic vinegar.
Pick all the meat off the bones and make rice bowls.
Pick all the meat off the bones and make chicken tacos.
Serve the roasted chicken with a tahini-yogurt sauce and a plethora of fresh vegetables.
(Want me to keep going? I love a good half-effort roasted frozen chicken.)
Each time I find myself in an Italian kitchen, I’m forever humbled at how perfectly simple and approachable they’ve kept their recipes over the centuries. They chose a starting place: a meat, a vegetable, a pasta shape. Then, a few adornments (salt, oil, basil, vinegar) make it better.
That’s it.
STAHP. That’s it.
This past October, sitting at one of my favorite restaurants, I ordered a dish I have enjoyed many times before: a plate with five slices of bread on it. Each slice is topped with something different; one is steamed spinach with oil and salt, another is chicken pate with truffle, another is mushrooms, yet another is tomatoes. S-i-m-p-l-e.
Each time I come away, palm to my forehead, wondering how I let the kitchen get too complicated again. I remind myself that cooking for people is far more important to me than flexing in the kitchen.
Perhaps that’s a good metric to run with: Am I cooking this to show off what I can do? Or to bless the bellies that are gathered around my table?
So yes. When real life presents real situations, like a sick Momma or an overflowing septic pump, I throw the frozen chicken into the oven. I joyfully reach for dried pasta, for loaves of frozen bread, for scoops of rice or lentils that stretch the meat further, and for all the vegetables gathered at the bottom of the refrigerator drawer.
And let me just tell you this: there’s no thrill for the home cook quite like putting something on the table when it felt impossible.
I say it out-loud (just ask Stuart): I’m proud of myself!
There are six at our table routinely. We eat three meals a day, seven days a week. That’s 6,570 plates served up from my kitchen each year, give or take.
Hell yeah I’m proud of myself.
I’m in here making magic — and sometimes, that starts with a frozen chicken.
Love,
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