Still pretty bad at roasting chicken

One of my favorite food memories while growing up is the Friday night chicken my mother would prepare. It was, for a number of years, almost always the same and it was consistently great. In an attempt at being healthy, my mom would remove the skin from all of the chicken --- that is except the wings for which skin remove was nearly impossible. The skinless chicken would get a little mustard and ketchup and maybe a few other spices. I never eat the skinless pieces though. For me, there were wings --- juicy and skin covered. So every Friday evening I would tempt nose burns while trying to get as many whiffs of the roasting chicken. These memories are a large part of why I don't think I could ever become a vegetarian (though I seldom eat chicken and almost never eat red meat).
I'm not sure why, but I'm pretty bad at cooking any type of meat. I think its the pressure. If I mess up some zucchini - no big deal. But if I mess up my chicken and make it too dry, or under-cook it, to me, this is a disaster. So with all of this pressure I over think things, doubt myself and usually end up doing the same, non-spectacular preparation of chicken.
The above mentioned preparation is essentially cooking the chicken with some garlic chunks, onion and potato in a deep cast iron pan, on the stove. What usually happens is that some pieces I cook are too large (like breasts) and others too small (like wings) and I end up needing to cup the breast open to cook the inside. This, of course, lets all of the juiciness of the meat out, and I end up with slightly dry dinner.
Last night I tried to oven roast the chicken, but impatiences, an oven which has no other settings than super hot, and an overly reactive smoke-detector cut this idea short. I needed to finish cooking my food on the stove top.
Perhaps I should look at a recipe book? Still, I'm afraid that a lack of control over my ovens temperature would make it nearly impossible to cook a thick piece of meat without charring the outside. Maybe I should try using my crock pot...
Anyway, I tend to learn from failures, but its been at least a year that I keep stove cooking my chicken and I haven't really learned better.