Poulet Fasi

Translation: Stuffed Chicken.  I have made many a chicken in my day, but I never stuff them.  I like Stove Top stuffing, or the yummy Thanksgiving stuffing, but I never put it in the bird.  Yesterday I did.  Everybody here likes chicken, and I think that almost no matter what you do to chicken (except coat it in mayo) I will like it.  This is from  A Taste of Haiti, which I have been working through. 

Poulet Fasi
Chicken:
1 roasting chicken
1 lime, cut in half
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 small onion, minced
1 shallot, minced
1 scallion sprig, minced
1/4 green bell pepper, minced
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
3 tbsp pikliz vinegar
1 tbsp mustard

Stuffing:
1/2 lb ground beef
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 onion, minced
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
2 tbsp pikliz vinegar
2 potatoes, peeled and diced

Rinse the chicken with cold water.  Clean chicken all over with lime halves, inside and out, removing any blood clots out of the cavity of the chicken (I must say I did not do the inside...maybe this is more necessary when you kill and pluck your own chicken).  Rinse with water again. In a blender, or with a mortar and pestle (or with your small Tupperware choppy thing), crush the garlic, onion, shallot, scallions, green pepper, salt, pepper, and pikliz vinegar.  Rub mixture into chicken, inside and out.  Glaze chicken with mustard all over.  Let sit in the refrigerator for a few hours.

For the stuffing, combine ground beef, garlic, onion, salt, pepper, and pikliz vinegar (now that I'm typing this I see that it doesn't say to cook the ground beef first, but mine was cooked).  Boil the potatoes.  Let cool.  Mix  potatoes with ground beef mixture.  Stuff the chicken right before baking.  Bake, covered, at 400 for 2 hours, basting every 15 minutes after the first half hour.

Five minutes after putting this in the oven, the kitchen smelled fabulous.  It smelled great the whole time it was baking.  Steve thought so too.  Melissa came in close to when it was done, and she also thought it smelled great.  She was relieved because when I told her that morning that we were having Haitian Stuffed Chicken, she was skeptical, but like a good, trusting guinea pig, she came anyway, and was going to eat whatever it was.  She was pleasantly surprised that it was this.  There weren't too many pan drippings (in retrospect maybe because the beef in the stuffing was precooked?) but I probably wouldn't have made gravy anyway because I don't think that's how they do it there.  What few drippings there were I did spoon over mine & Steve's chicken.  This tasted really good, really Haitian, I think.  Very happy with what I have made from this book so far.