I am happy with an easy chicken recipe that I can toss together after work and please the kids.
One or two chickens. Take out the guts.
A light coat of olive oil.
Cracked salt.
Dry rub of choice. Herbs d’Provence, Indian spice powders (those instant ones in the foil bags work great,) ginger/sumac/limon…whatever you have in the spice pantry!
Old fashioned round Weber kettle.
A small rack and a brownie pan (that will be sacrificed to the chicken gods and not used for brownies any more.)
An almost random amount of charcoal in your Weber - enough to make a one briquette deep layer, or so.
Light 'em up, wait 'til they are ready.
Place chickens on rack on pan and place that on your grill rack.
Put lid loosely on BBQ.
Wait one hour.
No need to check the bird meat temp, it will be just right.
Meat is guaranteed moist.
As close to a "can’t lose’ recipe as I can think of…
I can’t sew. I just do a poor man’s truss, putting a hole in the extra skin around the cavity and putting the drumstick handles through to tighten it up. Well worth it.
Rarely make whole chicken? Where do you get chicken stock bones? Don’t EVEN say you rarely make stock!
I will occasionally buy a rotisserie chicken from Costco and then I will use the bones to make stock. I really like their rotisserie birds, so much so that I don’t feel the need to cook whole chicken at home.
SF Chronicle did a taste test of rotisserie birds done by different places here in the bay area a few years ago. Costco came out on top. Whole Paycheck uses Marys but they massacre the darn things turning the meat texture into sawdust they are so over done. Sad.