That’s A Load of Crock

My husband and I picked up a second-hand crockpot via craigslist.org (of course) over the weekend. It is the Hamilton Beach Set ‘n Forget Programmable Slow Cooker (read the Amazon review) which my husband researched as one of the good ones. It comes with a temperature probe, which apparently was the selling point for this baby. When I first laid eyes on it, I thought, that thing is huge! It is, it hold 6-quarts! You could fit a whole chicken in it, and that’s what we did.

Found a helpful recipe online but pretty much just put what we had in the refrigerator and spice rack to make it work. I sliced up half an onion and a small rutabaga and placed those on the bottom of the pot. Then rubbed in some cayenne pepper, black pepper, garlic powder, and white pepper on the whole chicken fryer and placed it in on top of the onion and rutabaga. I added some celery as an after-thought. We set the probe temperature to 180 degrees and turned the crockpot on low and let it do its thing. In about 5 hours, it was done!

First of all, I had no idea rutabaga turns orange! And I can understand if it comes from the carrot family because it did taste just like one. Second the chicken was good, not the best – maybe we cooked it too long? It came out a little dry and since we just tossed the rub right before cooking it, the seasoning may not have penetrated the carcass long enough to really season it. Alas, it was our first try and since it was quite easy to do, I’m sure we’ll try it again – probably experiment with the final temperature to see if that would make the chicken less dry or season the chicken a few hours before.

We used the crockpot again after the meal to to make our own chicken stock. We added the bones and skin from the chicken, poured enough water to cover the bones, added a couple of bay leaves and a few churns from the pepper mill. Then we left the crockpot on the lowest setting overnight. In the morning we had about 6.5 cups of chicken broth which I put in freezer Ziplocs to store away for its next use.