How To Make A Suicide Quarter Chicken

Episode 32
Suicide Quarter Chicken is the one that comes out of your own oven. Every few months, I roast up a chicken for Sunday family dinner, having dry-brined it a day or two in advance. That marvel of those first bites, the skin crackling as the knife slices through it and the juices beading up around the fork, is impossible to repeat, even 20 minutes later.
That's why I get antsy if my sister hasn't fully set the table when the chicken is ready to cut up, and why I don't buy rotisserie chickens from grocery stores, even when their pedigrees outclass mine. Somewhere in between the market and my parking spot, while the bird fogs up its plastic case, while that smell of roast meat casts a witchy glamour far more dangerous to other drivers than a cell phone in one hand and an open fifth of Maker's clutched between your thighs, the roast chicken becomes less than marvelous. The muscle fibers tense back up, the skin softens. .