Food Notes: 1/6
Roasted whole chicken, Oscar's Smokehouse, orange juice, and more.
My brother moved upstate, so we cooked a chicken.
Right after Christmas, my brother and his family moved into a cabin in the Adirondacks. Winters here are snowy and cold. The pine trees sag under the weight of the snow and every day were there, gentle snowflakes drifted down. It felt like living in a snow globe.
Apparently it’s not always a snowy wonderland. Mud season will come soon enough, and then the air fills with the buzz of black flies. But summer is supposed to be a beautiful time here, despite of, or because of, the call of “stupid Canadian wolf bird.”
But winter here is cold. We arrived at the house in the final glow of daylight and a temperature reading of 17 degrees. There was a gentle flurry of snow falling. We unpacked the car, and then it was time to cook dinner.
My brother pulled a bag of chicken from the refrigerator. It wasn’t labeled, but it was marinating in a peppery mustard sauce. We debated how to cook it.
The temperature had dropped two degrees since our arrival, so grilling was out. The house came with a collection of enamel cooking pots, and we rummaged through the cabinet looking for a suitable vessel. We still weren’t entirely sure whether we were pan frying, braising, or roasting the chicken.
Then I opened up the bag. Inside was a whole, skinless, de-boned chicken, butterflied.
The chicken had come from a nearby meat store, Oscar’s Smokehouse, a local icon that opened in the 1940s. It’s so iconic, it even earned a recent profile in the Wall Street Journal highlighting the cheese curds and charcuterie.
Oscar’s Smokehouse is a family run business, in the third generation. Oscar and Edith Quintal, Canadian immigrants, started by smoking meats in their garage in the early 1940s. They opened their first shop in 1943, but this burned in the Music Hall fire which consumed several businesses in town. Oscar’s history page cites the fire as 1945, but the historical society and local fire department describe the Music Hall fire as taking place on an extremely cold day in 1950.
In either case, a second fire burned down the store on Memorial Day in 2009. Again, the family rebuilt the shop and production facility. They now ship products around the country, though their primary business remains in-person sales.
Although we had a chicken from the smokehouse, the main business seems to be bacon. In 2016, the store celebrated selling more than 8 million pounds of it. And just in case you had a bacon emergency, the shop unveiled a 24 hour bacon vending machine back in 2020, although its unclear if that’s still an option.
So we had this de-boned chicken from Oscar’s, an odd assortment of pots, and a medley of vegetables to choose from. I filled a ceramic baking dish with diced potatoes, baby carrots, and three celery sticks. A little salt, pepper, and olive oil topped these off. I laid the bird out on top of these and placed the tray in the oven.
I made one mistake in cooking this chicken. We should have pulled the bird about ten minutes earlier and finished off the vegetables while the meat rested.
We served the vegetables and chicken alongside a Sicilian citrus salad and leftover New Year’s Eve lentils.
When we left on Sunday afternoon, I didn’t realize we were driving by Oscar’s Smokehouse. Instead, we stopped at Deli & Meat Store of the North where my wife found gummy chicken feet candies and apple butter BBQ sauce. So now there are at least two destinations worth visiting in Warrensburg.
Roasted Whole De-Boned Skinless Chicken With Leftover Root Vegetables
INGREDIENTS
1 de-boned whole skinless chicken
3/4 of a bag of baby carrots from the back of refrigerator
1 sack of baby potatoes
3 stalks of celery
INSTRUCTIONS
Quarter the mini potatoes
Mix in the baby carrots
Toss vegetables with salt, pepper and oil
Layer the vegetables in the roasting pan
Add celery stalks whole across the vegetables
Unfold the chicken across the vegetables
Roast at 375F until the chicken hits internal temperature
Reserve chicken under a little tin foil blanket to keep warm
Finish roasting vegetables, about 10 minutes
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