52 weeks, 52 chickens

So I'm thinking, I need a challenge. Almost instantly I started thinking about cooking a whole chicken every week, for a year. I really can't remember how my thought processes got to this so quickly. I think roast chicken has been on my mind for a while, ever since I found a delicious chicken, ready to cook in an enamel tray, for sale in Jamie's Recipease in Brighton at the weekend.

Probably not the most daring or extreme challenge anyone's ever come up with, but hey... I'm a real person here, and I've got stuff to do most of the time. Like, work, and watch crap TV. But this challenge isn't going to be a walk in the park. I've decided to impose some rules.

1) No cooking the same recipe twice. If I cook the same recipe twice this year, it won't count towards my 52 chickens goal.

2) The recipe must involve a whole chicken. Although I thought about including recipes that involve cutting up the chicken, I'd like to see whether I can keep up a challenge of cooking the chicken whole, to make it slightly more difficult. Spatchcocked chicken is fine!

3) The goal is 52 chickens in a year, preferably one per week, but I'm giving myself leeway to cook two in one week, provided they're different recipes. You know, because I'm going to be jetsetting and terribly busy for moments of this year, I can feel it.

4) The price of the chicken, the origin of the chicken, the recipe and what happened to the leftovers must all be recorded.

5) The overall price of the dish must be recorded, along with marks out of ten from M and I. Obviously, every dish must be blogged, with photos if possible. At the moment, I have no camera, so this should be really interesting...

I'll be really interested to try out different priced chickens. I don't think there's a foodie on the planet who doesn't want to buy high welfare chicken every time they shop, but there are loads of budget ranges for whole chickens out there, so I'll be testing those out along with the corn feds and the organic free range chickens to find out what the difference really is. I figure this will give it a bit of a variety, and hopefully save me a bit of dosh to counteract the cost of the pricey ones.

I'm also really looking forward to scouring my cookbooks for some really unusual recipes, and working hard to ensure that I don't get totally sick of roasted chicken... If anyone knows any good chicken recipes, let me know!

Sadly, today's salt-baked chicken doesn't count towards my total, because I actually made that way back in June. (Still looks good though, after all that time...) For shame!