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Pollo e fagioli all’aglio con cavolo nero (Garlicky chicken and beans with kale)

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken, with the spine cut out and the wishbone removed or broken
• 2 bunches of tuscan/lacinato kale
• a generous quantity of peeled garlic cloves. Really just as many as you can.
• a similarly generous quantity of good quality olive oil
• dried red pepper flakes
• whatever savory herbs you like
• a big can of canellini beans, or two normal cans of them

Directions

1. First of all, preheat your oven with a rack in the middle to 400ºF
2. Rinse the beans and set them aside.
3. Tear bite-sized pieces of kale off the central rib and drop them into your biggest colander. When it’s full, wash and dry them and set them aside. Do this til all the kale is prepped.
4. Pour enough olive oil into the bottom of a roughly 1’x2’ high-walled baking dish to cover the bottom. I use a pyrex one, but you could use a metal one too.
5. Pour in your beans. Shake on some crushed red pepper. Mix it all with your hands. Ask yourself, is this really enough oil? It might not be, and you should add more if so.
6. Add in your kale, mixing it up with the oil and beans.
7. Pour in some water (or, if you want, some chicken stock!) until you have about a finger’s depth of liquid in the pan.
8. Now take your chicken. If you haven’t already, cut out the spine, and use a good knife or your kitchen shears to either remove or just break the wishbone. Pat the skin dry with paper towels, and set the chicken on top of the kale and bean bed, skin-side up. Do your best to spread the chicken out widely. Put that chicken spine in there, too, skin-side up.
9. Liberally apply some oil and a shower of kosher salt to the chicken skin. Sprinkle on your favorite chicken-enhancing savory spices (I use herbes de provence). Use your hands to rub it all over, including the creases.
10. Put the dish in the preheated oven and set a timer for 45 minutes. Go do something else. Live your life.
11. When that timer goes off, shift the chicken spine to the other side of the pan to give that area of kale a chance at some radiant heat, and to force the kale on the other side to steam a little. Make sure the spine section is still skin-up. Stir the kale around a bit. You’ll probably find that some of the kale has gotten thin and crispy; definitely try to stir those back into the wet part.
12. Set the oven to 350ºF, and set another timer for however long you want; it’s honestly hard to say, and at a lower temperature, you could let this coast for quite a while. I usually give this an additional hour-plus. Basically the name of the game now is: get all that liquid in the pan reduced and absorbed into the beans and kale. Let it do its thing until there’s no longer visible sloshy liquid in there.
13. When it’s all looking great (no standing liquid in the pan; beans looking plump and lovely, some of them a bit crisped on top; chicken golden brown), remove it from the oven and set a timer for 20 minutes. walk away.
14. After 20min, use the big tongs to move the chicken to a wooden cutting board. Set another timer for 20min.
15. After that 20min, break down the bird; the legs should separate easily at the thigh with an incision across the skin; a well-placed slice in the middle of the breast should get you to the neighborhood of the keel, and you should be able to easily separate the keel bone and cartilage from the breasts. You should now have 4 quarters, plus your spine.
16. For me, I immediately remove all the bones and put them in my stock bag in the freezer. After that long roast, the bones should very easily slide out. Be careful to also remove the joints; no one wants to eat an unexpected knee. I eat the skin off the spine part at this point, and put the rest of the roasted spine in that stock bag, too. This is also an important opportunity, since you are the chef, to claim the chef’s right: eat some (or if you prefer even, all) of the chicken skin. You earned it.

You can do what you will at this point. I usually chop up the deboned chicken, skin and all, into bite-sized pieces and mix it back into the kale and beans. This easily makes 5 meals, though if you’re a light eater, or eating it with something else, you can stretch it further.

If you reheat this in the microwave, I recommend portioning it onto a slice of good quality sourdough bread inside a bowl. The bread will soak up all the juices, and really round out the whole “it’s like a dried out ribollita” vibe.