Easy Flavorful Roast Chicken

TL;DR Recipe

Ingredients
1 Whole Chicken, thawed
1 Onion, halved and peeled
1 Apple, halved, cored optional
2-6 TBsp Butter, softened
Salt, Pepper, Garlic Powder to taste

Instructions
1) Remove Giblets and thoroughly rinse Chicken inside and out. Pat dry with paper towel.
2) Stuff Butt and Neck Cavity with Onion and Apple. I can usually get two halves (one apple, one onion) in the chest and one half (onion) in the neck. Second apple half becomes a snack.
3) Rub entire skin of chicken liberally with butter. Salt and Pepper liberally. Garlic to Taste
4) Cook 6-8 hours on low OR 50-70 Minutes at 400 degrees F
CROCK-POT COOKERS -- Be careful when removing chicken from crockpot, it may fall apart.

Story Time

I'm fairly certain I found the recipes I combined this from on the internet. It's a combination of some aromatics from my favorite Thanksgiving Turkey recipe (thanks, Alton Brown!), and a slow-cooker chicken recipe from a blog much like this one. That's not the important or fun part of the story.

When my husband and I first dated, we were working together and we technically weren't allowed. I'm typically a rule-follower, unless I think the rule is dumb. True Neutral, I think they call it. Anyway, because of this, we would find little code-words and ways to say "I love you" without actually saying the words. Believe it or not, this actually circles back to this recipe, stay with me.

During this time, I was living with some roommates, two of whom happened to be world-class culinary experts. On my way home, with hubby (then boyfriend) in tow, I got a call requesting we pick up four or five items from the grocery store, "and a whole chicken". Not wanting to forget anything on the list, we kept listing the ingredients ad nauseum, always ending with "and a whole chicken". Because that's the kind of people we are.

An hour or so we kept saying "and a whole chicken." Have you ever done that Meisner exercise where you keep repeating words back and forth to each other until they lose all meaning? Hubster and I are awesome at trapping each other in that exercise, because we share both a love of absurdist humor and a stubborn streak a mile wide. Eventually we started saying "and a whole chicken" as tenderly as though it were "I love you." Stone-cold sober, at 6pm on a Thursday in a Stater Brothers grocery store. We're just that cool.

The line eventually morphed from there to incorporate a Friends reference to Lobster, but for a good month or so, "and a whole chicken" meant "I love you" in my home.

Now, in the time it's taken you to read this story, you could have done all but the waiting on this recipe, so get to it! Enjoy you food and tune in next Sunday for a new recipe and story.