Roast Chicken with Fennel

I made this a week or so ago when I got home early one day. I post in order to memorandize a couple of useful facts: that it took almost exactly three hours from taking the chicken out of the freezer to sitting down to eat, and that if you stuff anything inside the chicken and roast it, it won't cook as nicely as the stuff roasted outside the chicken.

This recipe involved the usual chicken roasting procedure at 425 degrees for about an hour and forty minutes. The spice rub, which worked pretty well, involved a teaspoon or so each of fennel seeds, rosemary, marjoram, thyme, and sage, plus some salt and pepper, stuffed under the skin. The stuffing involved boiling quartered fennel bulbs for eight minutes and then mixing them with olive oil, whole garlic cloves, and some of the same spices, and rubbing this mixture on and stuffing inside the chicken. I put about half inside and half outside and supplemented with some cubed carrots and sweet potatoes and more garlic outside the chicken.

I don't really recommend this recipe. I had about four fennel bulbs slowly dying in the fridge (thanks, Eatwell!) and you can only eat shaved-fennel-and-parmesan-and-artichoke salad so many times a week, no matter how nouvelle it's supposed to be, so it was nice to find this recipe. I did discover that I enjoy fennel much more after it's been cooked, but I still have a limited stomach for the stuff and the combination of fennel bulbs and fennel seeds in the spice rub was overpowering after a while. The recipe I was sort of following called for stuffing some fennel and garlic in the chicken, but the garlic in there only got partially cooked and the fennel that ended up there was far inferior to the fennel that roasted outside.

To go with it, I whipped up some pasta with sliced sauteed portobello mushroom, leeks, and roasted red pepper. It worked out fine.