Simple (Sort Of) Roast Chicken

Are you wondering what to do with the fine whole chickens that our local Vitamin Cottage has on sale for $1.99 a pound through the end of this month? The March issue of Bon Appetit has an article called The Taste Test, detailing how a chef's mastery of cooking can be seen in the preparation of the simplest dishes, like a salad, a chocolate cake, or a roast chicken. The roast chicken recipe in the article has just three ingredients: kosher salt, butter, and the chicken. The instructions however don't strike me as all that simple, involving chilling the salted chicken, a high heat cooking start, and a resting stage, followed by more roasting. Hmmm.