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" Today my new life begins. Or, rather, I get a test-run at my new life. This life includes one 4-year-old, one 7-month-old and me. No grandparents, no babysitters, no daddy during the day. This life perhaps looks very ordinary to most families with one stay-at-home parent, but it&amp;#039;s brand-new to me. I&amp;#039;m excited about our little unit of three (we used to be such a cozy unit of two), but I&amp;#039;m also a bit nervous. With two children my attention is always inevitably split\u2014it&amp;#039;s just that things tend to go haywire if it&amp;#039;s split in too many directions. So over the weekend I&amp;#039;ve cleaned and done the laundry, and I stocked our larder with heat-and-serve food for the week. It all started with a roast chicken and some homemade chicken stock.  I admit I bought the chicken before I checked out any recipes. There are a bounty of recipes on the Internet for roast chicken, but they tend to fall into one of two camps: the Zuni-Bouchon method, which cooks a small (2 to 3 pound) chicken at high heat for a relatively short amount of time; or the Ina Garten method, which uses a larger capon and a slightly lower heat. I, of course, had bought a 4\u00BD pound chicken, too large for the hot-and-fast method but far too small for Garten&amp;#039;s recipe. So I split the difference, cooking my bird at 450 degrees for about an hour. What glorious results: crisp skin and succulent meat full of rich, chicken flavor.  I gleaned a couple of tips from around the web: keep the bird dry so it will roast instead of steam (so pat it dry after rinsing and no basting!), salt the skin heavily (and in advance, if possible, although I did it right before roasting) and put the bird in legs first (since the back of the oven is usually the hottest place. So I: 1. cut off the neck and removed all the giblets from inside the bird, 2. rinsed it in and out, 3. patted it thoroughly dry, 4. salted it heavily (you can really see the salt) and added pepper, 5. tucked the wings under, 6. put it in a very shallow casserole dish that was just barely big enough to hold it, 7. put it in a preheated 450 degree oven and 8. checked it after 1 hour. It was supposed to reach 165 degrees when I used an instant-read thermometer on the thigh; mine was at 180 degrees. It was still incredibly juicy. Go figure. Oh, it is kind of a smoky process, but the rendered drippings are wonderful. I just dipped bread in them and refrigerated the rest, maybe to make a potato rosti or toss with a savory bread salad.  Up next, the stock I used to make a pot of black beans and the chicken enchiladas made from the leftover roast chicken.  Do you spend the weekend cooking for the week? What does your weekend cooking look like? \u2014 Kim Walker  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/food-recipes/a43836/roast-chicken-5306/>