Hooray! I’m glad to hear that you’re getting into the swing of things. It sounds like it was a success! A few comments:
1. It looks like you got a pretty big bird; this may account for it taking longer than expected. You’re right, though, a lot of factors can affect cooking times, including your particular oven. I will say that it’s definitely worth the extra cost to buy free range, organic, and/or kosher chickens. What they lack in breast size they more than make up for in flavor.
2. Re: “the wrong pan,” that blackening you got is ’cause your pan is so big. Ideally you want a pan without a lot of room around the chicken. Who cares though? If you want to avoid killing yourself scrubbing that black stuff off of your pan, just put a layer of aluminum foil on the pan before you add your chicken.
3. I’m strangely pleased that you went out and bought a mortar and pestle. I will tailor my future directives accordingly. As you may have already guessed, for the Lebanese Chicken recipe, in addition to the coriander, you can (nay, should) smash the garlic to a paste in the mortar and pestle as well. I do it like this:
- roughly chop up garlic into a few pieces, add it to mortar with the salt
- pound that shit until it’s a paste
- now add the coriander seeds, and crush kill destroy
- in the mortar, add yr oil and lemon juice and mix it right there
Anyway, nice job!
