Two Lazy Gourmets

All you need to make a deliciously moist, perfectly roasted chicken is a good, organic chicken, a handful of kosher salt, and a hot oven.

So, I come from a food-obsessed family. My mother, a self-taught cook with a love of spicy foods, liked to experiment with exotic cuisines. Our normal home-cooked meals were things like meaty Brazillian feijoada, intricate Indian curries, and southwestern corn cakes with spicy chile-crusted prawns. Classic “American” dishes, though, like pot roast, meatloaf, and fried chicken, were veritable strangers on our table. By the time I flew the coop, I could deftly layer ephemeral phyllo dough into cheesy, rich spanakopita or whip up a Thai coconut milk curry without a recipe, but I had no idea how to approach some of the most basic cooking techniques. Roasting a chicken, for instance, was way outside my milieu. Way.

For years, I went about my business happily cooking up heavily spiced dishes from every corner of the globe. All the while, I’d hear friends talking about how they roasted a chicken on Sunday and used the leftover meat to make all sorts of satisfying dishes—enchiladas, salads, pastas, and soups—throughout the week. As life got busier, what with a family in the mix, that seemed like a great way to maximize my meal preparation efforts. But how? I was at a loss. I tried roasting a few chickens on the fly, but always ended up with dry and/or rubbery meat, and I was never even sure if it was cooked all the way through.

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