Month 9 day 12: Baked chicken and beans

Today I made:
Tuscan Baked Chicken and Beans, Cooking Light October 2010
served with leftover pear and goat cheese salad

Although I just cleared out all the chicken carcasses in the freezer to make broth this past weekend, I put a new one back in the freezer tonight. This recipe starts off by deconstructing a whole chicken into its various parts. Unfortunately, all recipes call for 3.5-lb roasting chickens, but I have never seen anything less than 7 lbs at Shaw's (other than the ~1-2 lb Cornish game hens). Where can you buy a chicken that small? Anyway, I've done this a few times, so it's no big deal except that I tend to be a bit of a germaphobe when handling raw meat, and pushing and pulling on chicken joints isn't great for that :-P Our normal knife was dirty so I was using one of G's "Henckels Eversharp" knives, which cut through the joints scarily well, and cut through the skin surprisingly poorly. I guess it's similar to those tools they use to remove casts, which cut hard things but don't cut skin. Anyway, it's a bit scary to use a knife of an unfamiliar weight and grip and see how easily it cuts through joints...
This was supposed to be all cooked up in a cast iron skillet. But even before adding the overly-large chicken, the beans and vegetables alone were to the brim! So I ended up transferring everything to a large 9x13 pyrex dish before baking. It just barely fit in that even.
The chicken was pretty juicy, and G liked the beans. Although there wasn't a lot of liquid added (except from the canned tomatoes), a lot must have come from the chicken because it was like a soup at the end. G said that even if we had just made the soup he would have liked it. The recipe claimed a yield of 4 servings, but for us it is definitely at least 6, maybe just because our chicken was so large.

This is a good dish for a cool autumn evening. It's a little bit involved, with the cutting of the chicken and then cooking each item individually before putting everything back together and baking. But as the recipe points out, there's a lot of work up front and then it bakes for 40 minutes, giving you enough time to clean up and make a salad or something and relax before dinner. As such, I think it would be a good one for having company over.