Chicken, Chicken, Chicken

In the face of doubt and mockery, whilst people told me it couldn’t be done …"You have to add liquid!” they said…and they were wrong…I cooked a chicken in my crock-pot. And it was good. Here’s how to do it to get an absolutely falling off the bone, then the bones all fall apart too chicken:

Crumple up a few pieces of tin foil and put them in the bottom of your crock-pot. This will raise the chicken up so that it doesn’t stew in it’s own juices (heh. I always wanted to use that expression and here it’s not even an expression!). Season your chicken as desired. I just used a little salt and pepper and some paprika (which is a good idea because your chicken won’t brown that much and it’s slightly less disturbing to look in the pot and see a reddish brown chicken then a pale wan looking one). Situate the chicken on top of the foil and do whatever else it is that you might do to a chicken. I tucked some unpeeled garlic cloves around it so we could have some roasted garlic with the potatoes that I planned to serve on the side. I think you could probably tuck a lemon or onion or whatever you like to tuck into chickens (I will not judge) at this point and it won’t effect the cooking time if you have a small enough chicken (ours was 3.5 lbs). Put the crock-pot on high for one hour and then turn it to low for about 8 hours. I put it on in the morning and turned it to warm when I got home. I have to say, it was an excellent chicken. It yielded about a cup or so of “juices” that, if I had actually been thinking about, I could have made into a nice gravy right in the crock pot, but I wasn’t so I tried to thicken them a bit with a little corn starch but couldn’t get them to a boil so it was pretty much an au jus sort of deal once I skimmed off the fat.

Excellent experiment and a meal I will certainly add to the repertoire. Just remember, you don’t HAVE to add liquid to your crock-pot. I checked it out and it’s OK. Clearly some people already know this but at least 3 did not because they told me that I HAD TO ADD LIQUID. They were wrong. Deliciously wrong.