El Viajero

First, a shot of the finished product:

It was a tasty meal and served its job well: filling the Viajeros to the bursting point. Let’s walk back through the preparation. The hardest part is related to living in Japan: whole chickens are just not common here. I suppose the reason is that Japanese kitchens are small with small ovens (ours is not that big), and food is mostly prepared to be eaten with chopsticks (no need for knives and forks). However, you cannot coax the same flavor out of cut up chicken as you can from a whole bird.

Our local supermarket, Yume Mart, is a relatively new kid in town, having bought out the former Nikko Nikko Do. Nikko Nikko Do was a local outfit and very accomodating. Yume Mart is an arm of Yume Town and is a bigger company with corporate offices outside Kumamoto. They don’t play as well. I went in to get some tomato sauce, you know, to make some meat sauce for pasta. No tomato sauce at Yume Mart! The manager steered me to the ketchup! Is there anything more basic than tomato sauce? But I digress a bit…

Anyway, Yume Mart, like most Japanese supermarkets, does not sell whole chickens. When Mrs. Viajero went to order a whole chicken, she was told they do not sell whole chickens. After some grilling by the Mrs., they relented and promised to have one for us.

I had a bit of sticker shock when I went to pick it up. ¥2111 is about $23! It was a good-sized bird at 2155 grams (just over 2 kilograms; sorry, I don’t do pounds, ounces, or any other Imperial-ness anymore), but come on! Okay, bird is home. Let’s get it ready. I usually prep all the vegetables, etc. first and do the poultry last to cut down on the chances for contamination. I wash all the veggies and drain them. Any peeling and cutting is next. My mashed potatoes are a hit, so I get a bag or two of russets (they are really small here). And you got to have lots of onions.

The other important veggies are celery and carrots, and I add some broccoli just for variety.

If you’ve noticed that there are more vegetables above than there are below, score yourself 10 points! I fill up about 1/2 of a large pot with onions, celery, and carrots for the chicken stock (I wrote a bit about this before) I start boiling while dinner is going on.

I rinse the chicken well and dry it off. I cut off the bits that the supermarket leaves on, like the neck and feet parts. Those go in the stock pot. I usually leave a stick of butter out in the morning, so it will be soft enough later when I need it. I take a big chunk of that and put it in a small bowl. To that I add the herbs and salt and pepper. I kind of blend it together as best I can with my fingers and squeeze off bits. Then I peel back the areas of the chicken skin that are big enough for a hand or even a few fingers to get in. I slide those herbed butter bits into as many places as I can; those yellow spots below are butter. Trussing is courtesy of The Joy of Cooking; that book is always handy on my holiday cooking table. Oh, yeah, I layer the veggies around the chicken.

I will cook the bird for about 15-20 minutes before adding the veggies next time. I don’t like them as soft as they came out this time. As you can see from the color and the sheen, the chicken juices and butter did not go to waste…

After the chicken comes out, I let it rest a bit.

While we’re waiting for the bird to cool down a bit, the potatoes I’ve been boiling (with some garlic, onion, and some kind of herbs) are usually about ready to mash. I use a hand masher and add some heavy milk and melted butter. They were especially tasty this time.

That’s about it. Note to self: grab another Viajero to take some shots at other times during the cooking process. Then I’ll have more to write about in future viajerations…