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The day before, make the rub:
You're gonna need a whole package of fresh rosemary from the supermarket or a goodly wadge from your garden.
And an entire head of garlic.
Now, take away five cloves of garlic and half-a-stick of that rosemary and put them somewhere else.
The bulk of the garlic and rosemary (take it off the stick), either mince finely together or crush the garlic into a small bowl using a press and go at the rosemary with scissors, slicing it into very tiny pieces into the same small bowl. It depends on which repetitive motions hurt the most and/or which motions most help you relieve any latent irritations at the world.
Assuming you've gone one route or the other, get it in a small bowl somehow and add 1/2-1/3 of an onion, also finely minced, while wearing swimming goggles. (That's part of the mad science. Cackle evilly and shout about how they said you were mad at the institute. Mad, I tell you!) If you are feeling exceptionally lazy, I guess you can use a tablespoon of onion powder instead. Or do both. I like onions, and it never really hurts, does it? Bwahahahaha!
Now, throw in anything else you'd like to pervert a chicken horribly with into the bowl. I like a tablespoonish of Italian Seasoning, enough freshly ground pepper that my wrists hurt when I'm done grinding it, some tarragon, thyme, and garlic powder, just for overkill's sake. Oh, and at least a teaspoon of sea salt or ordinary salt. Even if you're salt-sensitive, that's not a lot. Then I look at it and go "Hmmm." Then I put in more pepper, from the box this time so I don't have to grind it. Then more onion powder. Then maybe a little marjoram. Then maybe some sage.
Now, go get the extra-virgin olive oil and that chopstick sitting on your stove. Stir in enough oil to muck the whole thing together in a nice glop. Cover with saran wrap or aluminium foil, put it in the fridge, and order pizza for dinner.
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The day of, after lunch, make the stuffing:
Put about half a cup of wild rice on to boil, with a little over a cup of water, some of the extra oil from on top of the herb/oil mix you made yesterday, and a teensy pinch of nutmeg. I like Lundberg Wild Blend quite a lot, but ordinary wild rice is just fine. Once it's boiling, turn it down to simmer, put a lid on it and fugettabowdit.
Then, take a pound of mushrooms out of the fridge. Use a pound if you don't like the stems, or just over half a pound if you don't care, or a pound with stems if you just fuckin' love mushrooms. Criminis are tasty, but not necessary, ordinary button ones are just fine. Rinse and chop roughly. To me, that means quarter the little ones, and cut the huge ones into sixths. [If you don't like the texture of mushrooms or are cooking for someone who has texture issues, take off the stems and slice them and cut the slices in half. They'll be pretty damned small by the time they've given up their water, and will mix into the rest of the stuffing easily.]
Put the mushrooms in a big bowl. Like, somewhere between making-cookies big and holding-the-Christmas-salad big. Then, on top of them, put half an onion, chopped. Then put the five cloves of garlic and the half-a-stick-a rosemary from yesterday, chopped together and stick removed, on top of that. Then on top of that, put two pouches of unmicrowaved Uncle Ben's Ready Rice: Long Grain And Wild Rice Blend.
(I'm not saying you can't use your own brown jasmine rice or long-grain basmati or whatever the heck you like best. Go ahead! I recommend a cup and a half, dry, or three cups cooked. But the thing is, this rice-in-a-pouch? Is perfectly undercooked for stuffing a chicken. You don't have to cook it yourself, and you don't have to watch it like a hawk going, "Is it still chewy but mostly cooked? Is it a couple minutes short of done? How about now?" And the reason you don't have to do that with the wild rice that's still cooking and has fifteen minutes to go on your hypothetical stove while you're assembling the rest of the stuffing is because wild rice is chewy even when it's overcooked, and the wild rice is there to create this array of textures and flavors. Also, the rice-in-a-pouch is presalted and flavored, and you don't have to worry about the stuffing coming out bland. 'Cause bland stuffing makes me a sad panda.)
Then mix it all up. Now go check the wild rice. It's beginning to make potentially worrying noises. What's that? It's scorching the bottom of the pan and all the water's gone but it's still rock-hard in the middle? Put in half a cup of water, get the stuck stuff off the bottom of the pan, put the lid back on, and go watch a little TV. ...okay, should be done now. Still chewyish, I know, but that's wild rice forya.
Throw in one onion, chopped.
Now, get the spinach out of the freezer. Unless you hate spinach, I steadfastly advocate keeping a bag of frozen spinach in at all times, to sneak vegetable content into things. It's great for sneaking into risotto, soups, pasta dishes and even macaroni and cheese if you're feeling a bit weird. Frozen broccoli is also great for that, minus the soup. Except for potato-based soups, then it's lovely.
Anyway.
Throw a nice big handful of frozen spinach in your stuffing-bowl. Eh, a cup? Call it a cup. Then put the wild rice, drained of any excess liquid, on top of that. The rice is still warm, so it thaws the spinach a little. Nifty that way, huh? Don't forget to cackle evilly.
Go take a break.
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The day of, that afternoon, subcutaneous herbage:
Okay, take the chicken out of the fridge and put it in a roasting pan or on top of the cutting board so you can manuver it easily. Take its guts out of the little baggie inside, and put those in the bottom of the roasting pan to flavor the stuffing and use in soup later. Orient the chicken breast-up, which is also legs-up, with the legs pointing at you. Good. Now, the skin on the top should be a little loose where it was butchered. This is the mad science part.
Get the dish of herb/oil rub out of the fridge, take off the saran wrap, and set it real close-by.
This is a Chicken.
Now you're going to fineagle your fingers under that loose skin on the top so you can put rub under the skin right on the meat. Here's where you're aiming at. Aaaannnnd... Here's where you lift up the skin. Now, make a little room.
Then you just shove in the herb paste and spread it around as well as you can. Do that on both sides of the breast. Part of that spreading on the breast should be on the drumstick. This is where it starts getting dicey. After you've loosened up the skin over the breast, hook your finger around to the top of the drumstick. It won't slide there easily. There's a membrane usually there, and you might just have to poke your finger through it or use a knife. Try not to cut the upper skin if at all possible, so that the herbs will stay underneath the chicken-skin and bathe the meat in tasty goodness, lubricated by the fat liquefying as it cooks. Sounds like a disgusting process, maybe, but just wait 'till you taste it. Oh, yeah, now do it on the other drumstick. While violating the chicken, cackle maniacally.
Now, flip the chicken over, so the legs are still pointing at you, but it's breast-side down, so you're looking at the tail end, not the neck end. You had it easy on the breast side; that skin is loose and easy to muck about under. Here, you might have to make a cut. Then commence with your new subcutaneous violation point. Deploy herbs and shove 'em in. Do that on both sides of the tail; now the thighs will be herbtastic, too. I know precisely how dirty all of this sounds. I like it that way.
Last part of subcutaneous violation: The wing. If you're not a big wing-eater or by now you just don't give a crap, I don't blame you, and you can just give the wings a good extraneous herbal rubdown. Still sounds dirty, huh?
Now, put it in the fridge and have a nice drink. Call up someone and complain about how much work all this is.
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An hour or two before dinner, stuffing:
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F.
This is the easy part. Take the herbtacular chicken out of the fridge. Take the stuffing out of the fridge. Take a handful of stuffing and put it in the birdie-cavity. Take another handful and shove it in. Pound it in with your fist a bit. (Chickenporn...) One or two more handfuls will probably fill the bird. And then you have a whole bunch of stuffing left over. This is fantastic, because it means you don't need a poultry rack or to cut onions to prop the bird up on or to worry about doing something with the drippings. Just lift up the bird and dump all that extra stuffing underneath. All the rice will be nicely absorbent. The stuffing inside the bird will be soft and steamy, the stuffing underneath the bird will be soft and greasy, and the stuffing on the edges and bottom will be nice and crunchy and toasty.
Laugh your evil laugh. Give the doomed chicken one last pat.
Put it in the oven. Forget about it for an hour if it's a little chicken, an hour and a half if it's a medium-sized chicken. Then you can cut into it and see if it's done, or use a thermometer.
Mine's still in the oven, but this is what another one looked like that had a bit less stuffing. I'll post a picture of this birdie when it's finished, in about... half an hour or so.
Other things: You may want to cook it breast-side-down to ensure tenderness of breast meat. Or, you may want to cook it breast-side up, but covered with aluminium foil for an hour and then uncovered for half an hour. It's up to you. I almost never have trouble with the meat being dry.
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To Sum Up:
3-5 pound chicken, whole
1 pkg fresh rosemary
1 head garlic
pepper
onion powder
garlic powder
Italian seasoning
thyme
sea salt
olive oil
2 smallish onions or one really big one
1/2 pound mushrooms
1 cup cooked wild rice
2 packages Ready Rice
1 cup frozen spinach
Dash of insanity
Tomorrow, I will tell you how lazy people make chicken soup from the resulting Mad Science Chicken Carcasses. Which is very, very, very good chicken soup.
