winter is here!

it's finally getting cold, and i can't say how thrilled i am. i was going to go to studio all day today, but since carrien is home, we're going to make chicken pot pie - we're roasting the chicken right now. today's chicken has rosemary-thyme butter stuffed underneath the skin, is stuffed with apples and onions, and was rubbed with a salt-sugar-paprika-pepper mixture before being popped in the oven. same roasting method as before - 20 minutes at 400, then the rest (probably an hour to an hour and a half since stuffed that cavity pretty well) at 350. we'll let that cool, then pull it apart and make pot pie with it. god that smells good in the oven.

an update on the chicken: that was one beautiful chicken. of course, we let it sit for maybe ten minutes before ripping it apart for the pot pie, but it was a pretty wonderful thing. i realized that i really do like to stuff my chickens with lemon wedges (we didn't have any around), but it was good anyway - the herbs made up for it. it had beautiful color from the sugar rubbed into the skin - basically it looked like cookbook or food magazine photos of roasted chickens (though mine looked a bit ghetto with its makeshift coil-of-aluminum-foil trussing). perfectly cooked, too, so chalk that up as my first really good roast chicken. the pot pie was really good as well - i thought we wouldn't use up all of the thyme, but instead i just put it in everything (biscuit topping, roux, and vegetable mixture), hoping it wouldn't be too overpowering, and it was fine.