Cooking with Caroline: Oven Roasted Chicken

I'm in no way an expert cook, so I thought I would share my kitchen experiences, good & bad in hopes it will encourage others to try cooking new things as well.
Last night I had a dear friend and her kiddos over for dinner. My husband is out of town so it was a fun time for just the "girls" and our little ones. I have had this chicken in my freezer waiting to be cooked. Since we are moving soon I'm trying to eat everything up!!

And, first I must confess, this is only my 2nd time cooking a whole chicken. The first time I sort of cheated and used the crockpot. I say cheated since it just requires you to toss everything in, turn it on and it go, for hours! And after 4 hours or so it's obviously done.

For this chicken I started with a recipe from Martha Stewart here. I changed it up a little to fit what I had on hand. No fresh Thyme so I used dried and sprinkled it all over the chicken. Stuffed the cavity with onion, garlic & lemon. I did not have any kitchen twine to tie the legs together. I wonder how much difference this makes in taste? Someone please enlighten me!!!

Also the recipe recommends an instant read thermometer which I don't have but now wish I did. I couldn't quite tell if it was done after the specified time, so I had to cut into it and put it back in a few times. I am paranoid of meat not being fully cooked and feeding it to others!! Hopefully with future cooking I can get myself a thermometer!

Here is my before:

Another thing going against me was my ancient oven!! I think it is original to the house, built in 1980, and heats 75 degrees ABOVE the set temperature. We have known this since we bought the house but never quite made it to getting a new oven. So we always guesstimate and lower the temperature approx 75 degrees from what a recipe calls for. Sometimes this works fine, other times it is a disaster!!

Here is the proof of my OLD oven:

And here is the chicken after:

The skin came out nice & crispy and the meat was still juicy!! Overall I think it was a success. Hopefully with future chickens I can make some progress :)

I served it with Roasted Potatoes & Carrots.

Easy directions:
Slice the vegetables about 1/2 - 1 inch thick and put them in a medium sized baking dish. Sprinkle salt & pepper all over and drizzle with olive oil. Roast in the oven uncovered approximately 30 min until tender.

These came out quite good! The carrots almost tasted like sweet potatoes since they had carmelized some. My daughter who hate carrots actually liked them! I'm thankful we have leftovers so I didn't have to cook tonight!

What have you been cooking this week? Please leave a comment to share!