Beer Butt Chicken & Mixed Potatoes

This weekend's meal of choice was a personal favourite of mine, Beer Butt Chicken. Merging beer with chicken is an obvious and delicious combination. It makes the juiciest, most tender chicken I've had. And it would take an enormous moron to screw it up, which is nice for me.

Of course, you don't eat JUST chicken for dinner. Gotta have a side dish. So I dug through my closet and decided to clean out the remainders of my potato stash. I chopped up two sweet potatoes, one regular potato, one onion and a clove of garlic.

I may have busted out the beer a little early, too.

Next, I removed the well-thawed chicken from the fridge, seasoned it with cajun seasoning, garlic powder, salt and pepper, and rubbed vigorously.

It gets worse for this guy.

Next step: Mixed potatoes, onions, garlic with olive oil, salt/pepper, a splash of beer and some Greek seasoning in pan. I've never tried mixing sweet and white potatoes together before, so this was a bit of an experiment. It looks nice, though.

 I used Creemore Springs Ale as the basting beer of choice for this particular dinner, although you can really use anything (the thought of Guinness Butt Chicken is intriguing). 

Now in case you didn't already know, here is where the "Beer Butt" part of "Beer Butt Chicken" comes from.

This wasn't gonna fit.

 In order to ensure the optimal moisture seal, the now half-full beer can needs to be, ahem, inserted into the bottom of the chicken. I don't recommend 750 ml cans (AKA 'Tallboys') like the one above - the chicken just couldn't handle it, and I had to use a shorter can to make it balance over the potatoes.

That chicken is chillin'.

With the chicken neatly balanced, it was ready for the oven. Having the chicken cook over the bed of potatoes is nice, saving on dishes AND giving them some nice chicken-y flavour.

 I preheated to 275 degrees celsius, and cooked uncovered for two(-ish) hours. Here's the result:

Still standing.

Not bad, eh?

The skin was crispy, and the meat was juicer than the latest Kardashian rumour. I could actually see beer seeping out of the drumstick when I bit into it. The potatoes got a little mushy (more so the yams,) but weren't exactly inedible.

Pièce de Résistance.

This recipe was great as expected, however, the sweet/regular potato experiment failed and will probably not be repeated.

As always, comments or suggestions for next week's recipe are encouraged.