"Perfect" Roasted Chicken

This is try two... I just accidentally posted to the family website...

I'm back! My apologies for not posting last week. But I really liked doing this week's recipe. It was fairly simple and is definitely something I'll do again. It was fun dealing with a whole chicken again. It's as if the chicken's alive, and sometimes I talk to it while I'm maneuvering it/stuffing things into its bum. I couldn't find real rosemary at Wal-Mart and I didn't have time to look somewhere else, so I just used the canned rosemary spice. I covered the lemon slices in rosemary and stuffed them into the chicken along with the mashed garlic cloves and of course salt and pepper. We had to go to Caleb's nephew's birthday party and we knew we'd be gone for an hour so I put the oven on 350 degrees for about an hour, then when we got back home I turned it up to 450 for about 10 more minutes. It wasn't crispy, but it was still very good. I'm curious to see if those who did their's at 450 for 50 minutes got a more crispy result. I roasted carrots and parsnips along with the chicken and then used chicken granules, the chicken drippings, and corn starch/water for the gravy. This was my favorite recipe so far, but my only dislike was that it was TOO BUTTERY. It might've been fine without the extra teaspoon of butter in the gravy, but even the 2 tablespoons on the chicken I think was too much. Caleb said chicken was the first ingredient and butter must've been the second! After cutting and ripping apart a whole uncooked chicken I was not afraid at all when it came to "carving" this cooked chicken. I barely even used scissors, mostly just my hands. I felt like I was in Samoa (and apparently Caleb did too!), where they each get a whole chicken for dinner and just go at it. I'll be prepared when we go visit Caleb's mission.

It wasn't "perfect" but it was good. I moved it into this pan while I did the cravy in the original sauce pan. If you can't tell I used mint flavored floss to tie the legs together.
'Til next week!