Roasted Chicken (Quick and Easy)

This is such an easy, fast way to roast a delicious chicken and the whole thing roasts just like a rotisserie chicken (no soggy under belly).  A chicken typically takes over an hour to roast but doing it this way gets done in half the time. The trick is to turn your roasting pan rack upside down so instead of having a "valley" to rest the chicken in, you will have a "hill" to splay the chicken over.  You will need to figure out which side of the chicken is the back (I just look at the wings and figure out which way it would fly).  Using a sharp knife, cut along both sides of the back bone but not all the way through the chicken (breast side) and remove the backbone.  If you are in a hurry, you can just cut along the back bone and leave it intact.  I like to make this a one dish meal adding roasting potatoes (fingerling, creamers, baby reds) to the pan.

Ingredients:

One whole roasting chicken
two lemons
fresh thyme or dried herbs de Provence
4 sprigs of fresh rosemary, de stemmed and chopped (you can substitute thyme or dried herbs)
smoked salt (Falk Salt) or regular sea salt
fresh ground pepper
6 whole garlic cloves (or more)
8 ounces of chicken broth
olive oil
as many small potatoes cut in half on the bias(diagonal) as you like depending on how many you are serving

Heat oven to 375 preferably on convection roast if you have that function, otherwise, add 15 minutes to the cooking time.  Splay the chicken over the inverted roasting rack inside of the roasting pan.  Coat the chicken with olive oil, salt, pepper, fresh thyme or herbs de Provence and the zest of one whole lemon.

In a separate bowl, coat the cut potatoes and whole garlic cloves with olive oil, salt, pepper and your chopped rosemary. Slide them into the roasting pan underneath the chicken.

Cut the naked (zested) lemon in half and add it (not just the juice) to the pan.  Cut the other lemon into wedges and add it to the pan as well. These are really just for show.  They turn a beautiful roasted brown and can be served with the potatoes but this is optional too.

Cook until the internal temperature reaches 165.  This will be between 30 minutes and 50 minutes depending on whether you are convection roasting and the size of the chicken.  It is possible that you may need to add a little chicken broth to the pan if your chicken doesn't have a lot of juice dripping down.

Remove from oven and set the chicken on a carving board.  Remove the rack.  Put the roasting pan onto two burners (front and back) and add the chicken broth to deglaze the pan and make a jus.  Squeeze the two naked lemon halves into the jus.