The bird in the oven should have been beautiful. It WAS beautiful in the magazine picture accompanying the recipe I was making. But recipe pictures, in my experience, bear little resemblance to actual, finished dishes as created in my kitchen. In the rare event that my version does turn out to look something like that shown with the recipe, I am strongly suspicious that something has gone wrong.
Yet, those photos are seductive. Just follow these easy, 23-step instructions and you, too, will create a culinary masterpiece and be the envy of everyone. Yes, the envy of various wildlife outside my door, who gather in the hope that if they wait long enough I will toss a ruined meal their way.
But this recipe would be different, I could feel it. A whole chicken, stuffed with vegetables and onions, the encased in yummy homemade dough* and baked to golden perfection.
Perhaps because I had taken a shortcut on the dough**, I felt emboldened to take other liberties, such as refraining from tying the chicken's legs together. And since my dough was **, I used two sheets of ** pie crust dough to cover the chicken. It wasn't pretty, but I wasn't entering it in any contests.
About halfway through roasting, I peeked into the oven. I could see then why the recipe had specified tying the legs together with kitchen twine. They had burst through the dough and were now splayed, facing outward like two guns at the ready.
That was only the beginning. My attempt at joining the two sheets of dough together and creating a seam was evidently not sufficient. The entire bird had broken through its encasing of dough, transforming it into an Incredible Chicken Hulk. With the two legs sticking out like gun-like appendages, the menacing chicken was armed and ready to meet the enemy.
Too bad. It never had a chance against these two hungry humans.
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*That's what the recipe said, anyway.
**Not homemade.
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