After a long bicycle ride, sweating and smudged with dead bugs that flew into your sun block, you don’t feel like going to a good restaurant.

You dash into a fast food place hoping no one will notice your frizzy freak flag hair flying.

A McWrap.   Coffee and a cookie at a coffeehouse.  Anything at a downscale restaurant not actually run by Norman Bates.

Good food is for home.

So tonight I made Laurie Colwin’s roast chicken.

Colwin, a novelist and short story writer whose Happy Families is one of my favorite books, wrote Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, collections of her entertaining food columns written for  Gourmet magazine.

Her roast chicken is foolproof.

I can’t find the cookbook, but the recipe is something like this:

Stuff whole chicken with half a lemon.  Sprinkle chicken with paprika (I tend almost to coat it.)   Roast chicken at 325 degrees and baste (with chicken broth, in my case) every 10 minutes.  It should be done in three hours or so.  Keep an eye on it.

It is delicious.

Usually we eat it with rice and a salad, but the cupboard is so bare we had side of plain spaghetti sprinkled with  parmesan.

Eat in front of movie, Cedar Rapids, with Ed Helms, Anne Heche, and John C. Reilly.  An insurance agent heads to an insurance convention in Cedar Rapids after the kinky death of a colleague.  Very funny.

Here is the trailer: