The latest in whole chicken

So I discovered that my local Costco sells 2 whole chickens that are about 4 lbs each for 89 cents/lb. This is a great price to me and solves several issues in our kitchen: 1) a husband whose preferred meat is chicken and only the breasts 2) a wife (me) who prefers thighs if I'm going to eat chicken and 3) bones for soup stock. And I'll mention the 89 cents/lb again because well short of moving to eggs, tofu, and beans, none of which my husband eats, I'm not sure we can secure meat much cheaper.

So I've done a number of things in the cooking of whole chicken. I started with oven roasting whole chicken the low and slow way which Alton Brown has recommended. Results were fine as in I was happy with the moistness of the meat and the flavor from various seasonings. But low and slow requires a fair amt of preplanning. Then over Christmas I watched Jacque Pepin's youtube video on deboning a chicken and decided to try that. If you are him, you can do it in 5 minutes. It took me more like 20-30. Results on the grill were actually great, but I had a hard time figuring out what was dark meat and what was white meat. Given the above parameters, this was unacceptable. And 20-30 min of prep in chicken slime was a bit much. SOO...currently I'm butterflying/spatchcocking chicken. This is way easier than deboning and way faster than the low and slow method.

All I do is take a pair of scissors and cut out the backbone of the chicken. Trim off a little fat, flip the bird over and crack the breast bone. This allows the chicken to be flattened and ensures that I can have a cooked chicken in under an hr instead of the 3 or so hours with low and slow. So it's a touch more work that just seasoning a whole chicken but cooking time is greatly reduced. It's a ton less work than deboning entirely and I can still clearly identify all the meat parts. A happy compromise in my book.

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BTW the post that I've been ruminating about for several weeks as a follow up to the last post is what we're actually doing in our year of "doing less", but writing about chicken was easier today. So that's what I wrote about.