bizcuse me, you don’t know my chicken with forty cloves of garlic

[Title brought to you in part by some random thing someone said in college that became a favorite saying of my circle of college friends].

I’ve been lusting after this recipe – in its various forms – for years now. Ever since I shuffled off the restricting coil of vegetarianism (sorry, Em . . . stay strong!) and my mother gave me a copy of Cooks Illustrated’s Best Chicken Recipes cookbook. I pored over it voraciously, like a hungry pilgrim discovering a new land who’s desperate to learn the local customs and what the heck that stuff is on everyone’s plates. While all the recipes in this cookbook are amazing, the Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic spoke to me the loudest (meaning it made my tummy rumble the loudest). Unable to tackle an intimidating task like butchering a chicken so soon after leaving a world of tofu & Boca burgers behind, I bookmarked the recipe and let it sit on my shelf, uncooked, for years. And then. . . .

And then I was pressing the “Surprise Me” link on Smitten Kitchen and saw that Deb had posted a similar recipe.  So I bought a gajillion heads of garlic and said “This time it’s really happening.”   Since Emily is a vegetarian, I saved this cooking adventure for a weekend when my boyfriend (the beloved carnivore) was in town.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the differences between the two recipes, and by the time I pulled up the Cook’s Illustrated one, I realized that it had slightly different ingredients, so ultimately I decided to blend the two recipes and call it a day.

So, first, I peeled a ton of garlic, with the help of my beloved carnivore.

Whoa, dudes, that’s a lot of garlic – and don’t believe any recipe that tells you you’ll get 40 cloves from 1 and 3/4 heads of garlic.  I don’t know what kind of crazy garlic those people have found, but I had to use almost 3 heads.

After peeling the garlic, there was the whole issue of butchering a chicken.  I’ve roasted and boiled plenty of chickens – usually the latter and usually for jambalaya.  I’ve gotten the meat off somehow, but only after it was cooked, and usually without needing to cut off any bones.  Suddenly, I was faced with a challenge to my now years-old rediscovery of omnivorous cooking.  That challenge was 4.61 pounds and slightly bloody.

So I did what any book-smart, street/kitchen-dumb girl would do, and I watched a wikiHow video.

There were some missteps along the way (see photographic evidence to the left), but after I made the gash in the chicken say funny things, I went ahead and pushed the chicken together, kept carving, and found myself the proud queen reigning over a kingdom of 8 quasi-properly-carved chicken pieces.