Roasted Apple Pear Juice Jar in the Butt Chicken - Not a Recipe

I can't follow a recipe.  I use to try, but there was always one ingredient that I wanted to eliminate or switch for something else. Or one step that I thought could be done a different way.  I see a cookbook as a book of inspiration, not as an instruction manual for cooking. Today I roasted a chicken.  I don't usually cook a whole chicken because I don't eat anything but the white meat, and I hate cleaning the remaining meat off the bone to use for other meals, it's just icky.  But I cooked a whole chicken this time because I was inspired, not by my cookbooks, but by this funky gadget the hubby bought the other day.

A few days ago I was shopping with the hubby at the Tractor Supply 15% Off Bucket sale, where you get the discount on anything you can fit inside a five gallon bucket.  For us, this started out as a great way to save money on things we already needed, but it soon became, "What else can I fit in this bucket? I don't want to waste this discount when I have a little more room in my bucket!"  We already put his Wrangler Jeans, that he so desperately needed a few new pairs of, into the bucket, but there was still more room left.  I added some wildflower seeds that I wanted to plant for the bees this summer. The hubby added some welding rods he wanted to try, and we still had a little more room!  So as we were approaching the check-out stand, looking frantically for one more item to save on by filling that last little space remaining in the bucket, we spotted something just the right size. (As you can tell, their marketing plan worked so well on us.)

By this point it didn't really matter if it was something we needed as much as it mattered that it fill up the bucket.  That last little item was a wire rack that holds a beer can, then you put a whole chicken over the can, so you can roast the chicken in an upright position.  It's suppose to make your chicken taste "Soooo Delicious" cooked this way.

Well now that we owned this new gadget I figured I should use it. I bought a whole chicken at the grocery store. (I don't eat my chickens, they are my pets.)  I don't drink alcohol, and if I did it wouldn't be beer (yuck) so I wasn't going to buy a six pack when I would only be using one can.  They don't sell singles in the store I was in, I don't know if they do at other places, because like I said, I don't drink (or buy) alcohol so I don't know about these things.  So I get the idea to use apple juice instead of beer, I'm sure I have apple juice at home since the grandkids drink lots of juices at our house. So off to home I go.

Well I didn't have apple juice, I have an apple-pear juice, and not in a can but in a funky shaped paper box.  Since I was just canning jam yesterday I still have my jelly jars out and look...the jelly jar fits perfectly in the wire gadget!

So I pour the juice in the jar and put the jar in the rack, then slide the whole chicken on top.  I gave the chicken an oh-so-casual pose for this shot...

Then I made my version of a tin foil Christmas tree skirt to keep the hot oil and juices from popping out and making a mess of my oven -I hate cleaning the oven.

Then into the oven it went to cook at 350 degrees.  I baked it at that temp for almost an hour then pulled it out and rubbed it with a mixture of softened butter and marjoram seasoning, (I would have rather used rosemary but I was feeling too lazy to go cut some from outside then dicing it up).

Back to the oven for another 45 minutes, and it was done!  What do you think of my Roasted Apple Pear Juice Jar in the Butt Chicken???

 - - -

Oops, I forgot to take an 'After' picture.  It was more golden bronze then above and smelled delicious!  The meat practically fell off the bone so I got distracted and tore into it. The 'after-after' pic isn't so pretty so you will have to trust me here.

I served each of us a breast over a beautiful salad with spring greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, and feta cheese.  Again, no pictures. But take my word for it, it was beautiful!

So even though we really didn't need this gadget, and I didn't use it exactly the way it was intended to be used, I am glad that it served as an inspiration for a great meal...sort of like my cookbooks do.

So I'm dying to know, are you incapable of following a recipe like me?  Or are you an anal cook who does it E-X-A-C-T-L-Y as it instructs you to do in the recipe?