Carrots and sweet potatoes, tossed with olive oil, salt and red pepper flakes and oven roasted.

Roasted Carrots and Sweet Potatoes

I love roasted vegetables, and this is the time of year - when you don't mind turning on your oven - to get your fill of them!

Roasting really brings out the natural sweetness and enhances the overall flavor of vegetables and you just can't beat the ease of preparation.

Pot Roasted Chicken - Chicken in a Pot with Bacon, Onion and Potatoes

Whole chicken, slow-roasted in a covered Dutch oven, with bacon, onion & potatoes. Add a nice garden salad & a loaf of warmed French bread for sopping up those marvelous pan juices.

Chicken in a Pot

I happened to catch whole chickens on sale for 67 cents a pound recently, so of course I stocked up on a few and had in mind one of them would land as another form of roasted chicken for the Sunday Supper series for sure.  But, as I do sometimes, about mid-stream of beginning to prep the chicken for roasting, I decided to pull down Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking {affil link} and do something different.

A basic garlic and lemon roasted chicken with root vegetables cooked alongside.

Garlic Roasted Chicken with Vegetables

There is just something so heart-warming about a roasted chicken, isn't there? It's one of my favorite kitchen aromas.

The fragrance drifts throughout the house and just smells so wonderful, that sometimes I wonder if it's mostly because it invokes memories associated more with holidays past, than the present situation.

Thank goodness a nice roast chicken is easy enough to have much more often than the full-blown holiday spread!

Turn a whole chicken into a wonderful home rotisserie style chicken, slow roasted, loaded with flavor and as tender as can be!

Mimi's Rotisserie Style Sticky Chicken

There must be a hundred sticky chicken recipes on the internet for how to make a homemade rotisserie chicken, every one different from what I consider to be the original sticky chicken - Mimi's.

Several years back when I had a few extra mouths to feed and was working more than full time, I did the once a month freezer method of cooking. This sticky chicken was one of the most popular chicken recipes back then to make ahead and reserve the meat for casseroles. It's one of the carryovers I have held onto all these years, and that I still love today.

This simple roasted chicken using butter and plenty of lemon, has a bit of a reputation of garnering marriage proposals, enough so that it has been dubbed the engagement chicken.

Lemon Roasted Chicken

Legend has it, that the original "engagement chicken" first made its appearance almost 30 years ago now, when a Glamour magazine editor shared the recipe for a simple, roasted chicken with an assistant, who prepared it for her boyfriend one evening.

A month later he proposed. While you can read more about the story here, all that aside, it's certainly a great recipe for a roasted chicken. There is just something so comforting about the smell of a chicken roasting, that it's one of my favorite methods of cooking chicken.

Bacon-Wrapped Roasted and Stuffed Boneless Turkey Breast

 

Turkey Roulade, a whole turkey breast, butterflied and deboned, pounded thin, stuffed, rolled and roasted.

Bacon-Wrapped Roasted Stuffed Boneless Turkey Breast

A turkey roulade recipe is a fantastic way to go, if it's just you and your significant other for the holidays, or you just don't want to deal with roasting an entire turkey. A turkey roulade is simply a boneless turkey breast that has been butterflied, pounded flat, and then stuffed, rolled and roasted in the oven. It is an excellent way to get a taste of your traditional turkey and dressing, without having a boatload of leftovers.

Chicken thighs, roasted with a garlicky, thyme, lemon and balsamic sauce, onions and potatoes.

Roasted Balsamic Chicken Thighs

I had a large, 5 pound package of chicken thighs in the freezer, though unfortunately they were the kind frozen into one big blob and not individually so I pretty much had to thaw and bake the whole package.  Whatever isn't eaten up in leftovers will be deboned and frozen to use in casseroles or maybe some chicken salad.

How to oven roast a large hen or turkey.

Oven Roasted Hen or Turkey with Buttery Pan Sauce

This post was written for open roasting (meaning not covered or wrapped) and using a 7 pound hen, but it is the same basics for roasting a turkey, so everything pretty much applies to a small or large turkey with timing adjustments, of course.

While you're here, be sure to check out my other posts for how to brine, how to truss a bird, and also click here for some holiday side dishes like, Homemade Herb Dressing, Parslied Corn, Carottes Glacées, Maple Glazed Baby Carrots, Mashed Potatoes with Cream Cheese, Traditional Southern Sweet Potato Casserole and other southern favorites.