Wash Your Hands, Dinner Is Ready: First I roasted a chicken and then I did this

Roasting a whole chicken is both an easy and economical way to go about cooking for your family. It's easy because basically all you have to do on night #1 is stuff it and throw it in the oven. It's economical because there is so much you can do with it once its roasted. From preparing multiple meals to making homemade chicken stock, one little chicken goes a long way! The other night, I used a recipe my mom sent me from Taste of the South Magazine for, well, easy roasted chicken.

I didn't have fresh sage or thyme, but I had a ton of fresh rosemary so I threw that in there instead. You can probably substitute just about any fresh herb for the herbs listed in the recipe. It all tastes good! Or an orange in place of lemon? I don't know, but I am sure I will be experimenting in the future because this dinner was such a piece of cake!

Oh, and I accidentally cut up a bunch of onions that were actually supposed to be used in the accompanying sweet potato recipe. Since I wasn't planning on making sweet potatoes as a side dish, I just stuffed as many onion wedges as I could into the bird and placed the others around the chicken in the roasting dish. They ended up being very tasty.

I served the roasted chicken on the first night with roasted potato coins and a side salad. It was a home run!

The recipe for roasted potato coins is pretty simple, too. Wash whatever kind of potato you'd like to use. I love potato skin so I rarely ever peel potatoes (unless I'm using Russets in mashed), but this means I have to scrub them well.

Slice your potatoes into half-inch coins. You can soak the slices to reduce the starch content or you can just sprinkle them with a little salt and pat dry with paper towels. Lay the potatoes out on a baking sheet- trying not to overcrowd. Drizzle a small amount of olive oil over the potatoes (just a couple of tablespoons) and toss by hand until all potato coins are coated in oil. Spread them out in a single layer again and season with whatever you want. Another idea is to do this in a bag. Put your potato slices, olive oil, and seasoning in a bag and shake it up!

Bake in a 450-475 degree oven for around 30 minutes. Keep an eye on them though, because their cooking time depends on the thickness of the coins you cut. Flip them once and give them 5ish more minutes. They should get nice and crispy!

Naturally, we had quite a bit of chicken left over after dinner #1, which I love. Why do I love this? Well for starters, because of what I said earlier: a lot of recipes call for 1-2 cups rotisserie chicken. Having a bowl of leftover pulled-off-the-bone chicken opens up a world of possibilities for the rest of the week's dinners.

I also love it because it means I have to take some time out of my busy day to actually pick the meat off the bones (I hope no one reading this is squeamish- sounds quite grizzly). Why is this such great news? Well, because as far as I can tell, cleaning a chicken takes enough time to justify watching a movie in the afternoon. See how I did that?

Anyhoo, on to dinner #2 from the one little chicken: BBQ Chicken Quinoa Salad. I love me some quinoa salads because quinoa salad = protein rich salad = filling and satisfying salad. Also, they are lettuce-less salads, and sometimes my salads need a break from lettuce...

I took my off-the-bone chicken, mixed it with some BBQ sauce, put it in a casserole dish and baked it in the oven on 350 degrees while I prepared the rest of the dish. You could also prepare chicken for this recipe in the crock pot days ahead of time. I think grilled BBQ chicken would have been pretty yummy, too!