Baked Chicken

I was very inspired by Doria's Christmas turkey so much so that I decided to create my own version using chicken instead. It is just so surprisingly easy to cook it.

The ingredients needed are:

• A chicken (medium)
• Strips of bacon
• Olive oil
• Salt to taste
• Celery sticks
• Carrots
• Bombay onions

To prepare the chicken, clean it the day before and pat it dry before putting it overnight in the fridge (not freezer). This will ensure that the skin will be dry enough.

On the side, just cube the veggies. They are for stuffing. You can pre-cook your veggies before stuffing, which I did, or you can just stuff them raw.

Before baking, just rub some olive oil and salt all over the chicken. Then, stuff the chicken cavity with the cubed veggies until full. I also stuffed in strips of bacon for taste.

Put the chicken in a baking tray and fill up the tray with leftover veggies. After that, cover the whole chicken with strips of bacon.

Your chicken will look something like this:
 

 Pre-baked chicken

Jan 10: Kitchen

Then, just pop the chicken into the oven. I do not have a proper convection oven so I just used mom's old oven which do not have timer or temperature setting. I baked it for about 1 1/2 hours until the bacon turned crispy which looked like this:




The chicken skin did not turn cripsy. It looked pale! :(

I suspect it was because the temperature was not high enough to brown it.

After the chicken had cooled down a bit, I just took out the veggies, poured the gravy into a bowl, and shredded  the chicken meat (should have carved nicely, but was too hungry and lazy).

I served this dish with mashed potato.

Yummy!

I will try this dish again and this time I'd make sure that the chicken skin will turn out crispy.