Roasted Chicken with Ramp Leaves

My goodness! I managed to skip a whole day there somehow. Well, I'll have to make up for it now.

Yesterday I was planning on more yogurt-making, but it seems I'd left my thermometer behind from making ricotta at my boyfriend's. Sigh.

Nonetheless, I still had a nice local dinner up my sleeve: a chicken from Brookside Farm in Argyle, New York. They raise beef, veal, chicken, and turkey. Their turkeys are those broad-breasted whites that can’t reproduce on their own. Fans of Dirty Jobs might remember the episode of Mike Rowe watching someone prepare to artificially inseminate the buggers, sucking semen out through a tube in his mouth. He even gets to help inseminate some of the girls. Good times. At any rate, these bad boys fatten up quickly, have tons of breast meat, and are the most common breed to raise besides - this is the flavor most Americans are familiar with on their Thanksgiving table. The main reason I won't likely reserve my own is the daunting notion of trying to come up with an entire turkey's worth of cooking in such a small household.

At any rate, I had two different things I wanted to try out on this chicken, so I cut her in half. I have a recipe for Chicken Tandoori that I wanted to try with my own yogurt, and I also got some fresh sage and rosemary from Bowman Orchards. Since I wasn't able to make my yogurt, clearly the sage and rosemary were up last night. I also had some leftover leaves from some ramp that I'd chopped up for roasting with some Corolla potatoes from Sheldon Farms. They were yellow potatoes not entirely unlike the more-familiar Yukon Gold, apparently the number one in Germany (the Corollas, not the Yukons). They had a very firm flesh and were mighty tasty.



Roasted Local Chicken with Ramp Leaves

½ a chicken
4 sprigs fresh rosemary
4 sprigs fresh sage
2 ramp leaves

Pour a half-cup or so of water in the bottom of a broiling pan to keep the drippings from burning (for gravy later!). Wet two sprigs each of the rosemary and sage and wad them up to go in the half-cavity of the half-chicken; lay the chicken on top of them. Salt the chicken and chop up the remaining rosemary, sage, and ramp leaves and throw them on top.

Roast at about 350 degrees for two hours or until done.

Yum!



I made gravy by pouring a bit of broth into the bottom of the pan to scrape up the few drippings that were there; then I poured it into a skillet with the remainder of the can (didn't have home-made on hand). Added two tablespoons of corn starch and stirred it over medium heat till it got thick. No local mashed potatoes last night, though I would have liked them - the remaining Corollas are slated for a Potato Soup with Ramps this evening. We had some brown rice instead. Not too bad, if you cook it with enough butter and salt.