A $2,500 Chicken!

Ah, what to have for dinner? The eternal question. I thumbed through a twenty-year-old issue of Everyday Food magazine. Long out of print, it had been a helpful publication from Martha Stewart’s lifestyle empire, chock full of recipes, tips, menus, and encouragement. I still have a dozen issues tucked away.

I turned a page and came across a recipe for thyme-roasted chicken. The recipe urged you to roast not one but two chickens, along with a bunch of red potatoes. After enjoying the roast chicken and potatoes, you could then fold the extra meat from the second chicken into one or more additional chicken dishes—think chicken enchiladas, chicken salad, chicken chowder, barbecued chicken sandwiches. The technicolor photos and cheerful, pithy text whispered a subliminal message: Do it our way and wonderful, tasty dinners will effortlessly flow from your fingertips.  

I ended up buying just one chicken. I thought I had some potatoes still on hand, but when I checked, I actually didn’t. So the chicken sat forlornly on the roasting sheet. I carefully prepared the thyme and garlic filling and rubbed it under the skin. I tied the legs together and tried to arrange the wings as instructed. I had certainly roasted birds before, but since this recipe had Martha’s imprimatur, maybe it would turn out perfectly. Perhaps I was a little liberal with the olive oil I was told to spread over the chicken. After all, there were no potatoes around it to absorb the oil and drippings.

But I was in a rush. Into the 450º oven it went. For an hour. Wait a second. Wasn’t 450º a bit high? Well, it must be right since Martha said so.

Half an hour later loud spattering sounds snapped like castanets. I opened the oven door and plumes of oily smoke billowed out. I turned on the ventilation fan and opened the back door and swished it back and forth, hoping not to trigger the smoke alarm.

A small mental voice urged common sense, to turn the oven down, but I wanted to follow Martha’s instruction to a T. She always implied that her instructions yielded perfection. Never mind if extra virgin olive oil has a smoke point between 350º and 410º degrees. Martha (or more likely her food editors) must know what she was talking about.

I ignored the volcanic smoking and waited out the timer. By now the entire family room was buried under a layer of smoke. My husband was not amused. But, I had a delightfully golden chicken, its crispy skin and moist flesh suffused with garlic and thyme. And it was delicious.

Unfortunately, the oily oven continued to spew torrents of smoke upon further use. I faced facts: I must clean the oven. Self-cleaning didn’t seem the right option — what would happen at even higher temperatures? And I didn’t want to use a noxious oven cleaner. I know — I would be very Martha and use “natural” household supplies to clean the oven. That’s right: baking soda and white vinegar. A little Internet research encouraged me to dive in — just make a paste of baking soda and spread it thickly across the inside of the oven. By the next morning, it should magically peel off, leaving pristine surfaces. If necessary, a few spritzes of vinegar should help (according to some online Martha tips).

The next morning, I tackled the dried paste with gusto and several rolls of paper towels. I used almost two bottles of vinegar. It was satisfying to see the baking soda fizz when mixed with the vinegar. The baking soda poultice did remove much grime and grease. Sort of magic. But it was tough to remove so much baking soda from the oven. The door turned out to be a special challenge, with the window sporting a thick layer of “enameled” grime. Several dousings with baking soda and vinegar failed, so I wound up scraping the window with a razor blade til it was almost as good as new.

Meanwhile, the baking soda paste had seeped through some vents inside the oven door and now dribbled down an inner pane of glass like sprayed toothpaste. Three and a half hours later I sat back, exhausted.

The oven deserved a test. It was clean if one overlooked some streaks of dried baking soda and those pesky drips deep inside the oven door window. Suddenly I heard a beep, and a strange symbol lit up the display panel. And now the oven refused to turn ON. We’d never seen this symbol before; Luke said it looked like the ancient Egyptian ankh, a common hieroglyphic symbol. Some YouTube research revealed that it was a warning light for the temperature probe, a device that had long disappeared by the time we bought the house. Heeding one helpful video, we peered and poked with a flashlight until we located the tiny probe hole in the oven wall and inserted a kebab skewer to dislodge the baking soda crust I had unwittingly scrubbed in. Voila! The probe warning light turned OFF. The oven would now turn ON.

Finally, a clean, working oven. But the baking soda drips inside the oven door window looked filthy from across the room. “I think I can unscrew this panel and reach that inner pane and clean it,” said Luke. The next weekend he tackled the screws on the inside of the oven door. But it didn’t seem to be coming off readily. I heard some loud cracking sounds and hustled out of the room. CRASH! I returned to see the whole front face of the oven door gone, in a million pieces on the kitchen floor.

Amazingly, it still worked. And it was clean. But with no handle left, I had to open the door by grasping a small lip at the top with a potholder and then hold it open or else it would spring shut. And the baking soda drips remained out of reach, sandwiched between inner layers of glass. We carried on using the oven til a replacement was installed.

“Next time you roast with olive oil, be sure the pan is deep enough,” said Luke. I nodded. And thought: Next time trust your own instincts — they’re “perfectly” good enough!

Copyright © 2025 Andrea Kahler Robertson