This is exactly what our Crockpot looks like.
Digikami and I are in the midst of an experiment. "I want to try cooking a chicken in the slow cooker," I said. I am currently obsessed with the Crockpot, and use it ALL THE TIME. (That last part was not a quote from the conversation, but might as well have been.) "Sounds like a plan," he said, "and by the way, here is this website where they used a whole chicken to eat for a week on $26." We made some plans, which involved scrapping every one of those people's recipes and subbing in our own, and went to the store to stock up. I forgot to save the receipt, so unfortunately the money side of our experiment will have to remain conjecture. I think it is safe to say that two people eating all of a chicken will be saving some money. And also might get totally sick of chicken and never want to eat it again. So on Wednesday at 8am, I put the water on for coffee, cut up some carrots and celery, and hacked an onion in to quarters. I ground the coffee beans, and cut the plastic from our 7 pound roasting chicken, let's call her Beatrice.
This is someone else's photo, but it represents the grace and beauty of our dear bird quite well.
It turns out that good old Beatrice was a pretty opinionated bird and was a little reluctant to relinquish her internal organs. I managed to convince her it was in her best interests to let go of the packet, but her retaliation was to remind me the hard way that there's quite a bit of bloody water inside a whole chicken. At this point, my kettle was screeching, so I washed my hands and poured the water into the French press. I finally got Beatrice cleaned up, plopped her in on top of the veggies, sprinkled her with salt and rosemary, and triumphantly put the lid on the Crockpot. Then I swore because 1) I hadn't had any coffee yet, which is a serious problem with Crockpot cooking that nobody ever warns you about, and 2) the chicken was sticking up out of the Crockpot and the lid wasn't on right. After a moment wafting delicious, life-giving coffee steam toward my nose, I proceeded to shove as many of the vegetables as would fit into the gaping body cavity of our honored guest. Equally triumphantly and significantly more successfully, I smacked the lid on, poured my coffee and ran off to work. Returning home at about 5:30, I was delighted to find that the apartment just smelled vaguely and pleasantly of chicken, not like the smothering, disgusting stench of cooking chicken broth, which, as you might have inferred, I don't like very much. "Well hello, Beatrice!" I said. Yes, I talk when there is no human around to hear me. DEAL WITH IT. "Let's see if you're done, shall we? Good thing I have this handy meat thermometer!" Ladies and gentlemen, chickens are done cooking when their internal temperature reaches 160 degrees F. Ideally, you take meat out/off of the heat source a little early so the residual heat finishes the cooking and it doesn't get too done. Well, upon jamming the probe into poor Beatrice, the reading shot up to 185. "Good heavens!" I think. (Or something similar, but quite possibly more profane.) "I'll just try a different part, maybe that was incorrect." My next reading being an instant 200, I decide it might be time to liberate Beatrice. There is a nifty trick in which you use the handle of a spoon stuck inside the bird to lift it, and I figure that would be my best bet for getting a really hot bird out of a really hot ceramic pot. I select my weapon of choice from the utensil pot, put it in the chicken, lift up, and promptly fling little bits of meat and grease up the side of the fridge. Turns out the only thing holding Beatrice together at that point was habit, and the spoon slipped right through, breaking the wishbone in the process. Beatrice wins again. Abandoning the spoon trick as a lost cause, I settle for grabbing a drumstick and pulling as gently as possible. A lot of cursing and splattering later, this is what our beautiful whole chicken looks like upon her emergence from the Crockpot:
Thank you, thank you. I know my culinary skills are truly inspiring.
I cover that mess with foil and shove it in the oven to get it out of the way. Then, because I am a good Midwestern girl at heart, I see the goo and think it should become gravy.
It is at about this point that Digikami gets home from work. He is much amused by the small glass full of chicken fat, and even more amused once I point him toward the mangled remains that we are going to call sustenance for the next week or so. He agrees to begin making stuffing. Relieved to be off the hook, I take a shower. When I return, Digikami is poking at some bread crumbs and muttering to himself. Now, while the latter may be a more or less common experience, the former isn't so much. "There's plastic in here," he tells me. One garbage can spelunking trip later, we determine that somehow part of the bread bag got mixed in during the process. I volunteer to pick it out.
Henry is supervising. Irony of ironies, there is an issue of Fine Cooking on the table.
Once the plastic was all mostly removed, dinner progressed nicely. The gravy was gelatinous and lumpy, but all in all, everything was quite successful! Somehow, despite cooking the chicken in a single pot, we managed to use every other dish in the entire kitchen in the 20 or so minutes leading up to eating, so the clean up was epic. Because my roommate is awesome, he did most of the washing up while I dismembered Beatrice. It was a highly educational anatomy lesson.
Except she was missing her head, neck and feet, of course. And had fallen into about a billion smaller pieces by this point.
At the risk of grossing you out even more, dear readers, the neatest part was the bit of spine, complete with spinal column. Yes, I was a little wigged out, but in that "oh man, that's so GROSSAWESOME!" way that is familiar to many of us from biology class.
The HUGE amount of meat is center. Veggies to the right in the bento. Sorry I didn't get a picture of the huge pile of bones!
I had planned to update you on each of our chicken meals, but 1) I think that would actually be pretty boring for you, and 2) I am kind of lazy, guys. Last night, we had curry. It was yummy! Tonight, we had fajitas. They were also yummy! We have leftovers of our leftovers (meta-leftovers?) and I am, so far, only a little bit sick of chicken. And now I would like for us all to raise our glasses to Beatrice, who didn't have any say in becoming our dinner, but whom we appreciate nonetheless!
