First a clarification and then a confession….

 

Clarification– in case you are confused, the chicken itself is not gifted (although it very well could be, as it is organic. But that’s a whole other discussion). It was a chicken that was gifted to me by a lovely friend.

Confession– Until 2 days ago I had never cooked a roast chicken before. Ever. In fact, I had never cooked a whole chicken in ANY way before. *I am seriously concerned that I have now lost all cook/foodie/gourmet person credibility through this admission…..

So this is the recount of roasting my first-ever chicken. How, you may be asking, is this even possible??!! Well, quite simply, it is my mother’s fault. Naturally. The morning after the event (being the inaugural roasting of the chook), I rang her to enquire as to why she never made roast chicken- or roast anything actually- during my childhood. Her excuse was flimsy, something along the lines of ‘Oh I don’t know, I was never really ‘into’ roasts back then”. Not ‘into’ them?? It’s not like she was Vegetarian. Well, she had clearly forgotten that she had told me the real reason about a year ago- that they made her oven dirty and she hated cleaning ovens. Now that explanation is completely acceptable!

So anyway- the gifted chicken. My lovely friend had started defrosting an organic chicken in the fridge when she found she had to go away suddenly. So she delivered an almost-defrosted bird to me and I remembered reading, recently, various blog posts and articles online claiming such things as ‘how to make 7 meals from a chicken’, or ‘stretch a chicken 9 times’. I had read these with interest but had been skeptical that you could feed a family this many times with only one chook. So I decided to trawl the net, reviewing the various claims and then attempt my own (considerably more realistic) experiment.

I started with my first roast. I came upon many lovely-looking slow-cooker recipes for this but they required 7-8 hours and of course it was already 5 hours before dinnertime. I read a few other recipes and combined them in my head, deciding upon this method:

Meal 1: The Roast chicken.

I rinsed the chicken well and patted it dry. I then placed it in a clay pot, breast side down,  and rubbed it all over with extra-virgin olive oil, celtic sea salt and pepper. I got two lemons, rolled them around to loosen the juices and poked holes all over them with a skewer. I placed them in the main cavity, a little rosemary in the neck cavity, and splashed 1/2 cup of white wine in the bottom. I covered it and put it in the oven at 135c for 3 hours, then 190c for another 40 mins, uncovered, followed by resting for 10 minutes. Lo and behold, it worked! The meat was tender and a delicious, dark-looking gravy was floating around the bottom. As we served, we basted large amounts of gravy over the chicken which was very tasty. We are a family of four and I estimate that we ate approximately half the chicken, but bear in mind that  it was organic which are usually larger.

When my husband (the official household de-boner and anything meaty person) shredded all the chicken and took it off the bone, we placed it in a container in the fridge combined with the considerable amount of leftover gravy, so in a way it was kind of marinating and soaking up that flavour. We put the bones straight into the slow-cooker with a bay leaf, celtic salt, peppercorns, bits of vege ends and a splash of cider vinegar and left it overnight. After 16 hours we had a delicious chicken stock!

Meal 2: Grain-free/Paleo Chicken Tacos.

We don’t normally eat iceberg lettuce but rather the gourmet loose leaf-kind, but last week my daughter’s school had an excess of icebergs leftover from our school fete so I grabbed a couple. I had planned to make San choy bow using chicken mince but was a little disorganised with getting the necessary ingredients. Then ‘Bam!’- I had a Paleo brainwave. I tried to google ‘Paleo taco chicken’ and other variations but the results all seemed complicated AND it was Sunday AND I didn’t have any of the fancy ingredients listed in their recipes. So, I simply added to my leftover 1/3 shredded chicken, now all moist with the gravy:

1/2 cup of the chicken stock now ready

1/4 tsp garlic powder

1/4 tsp onion powder

1/2 tsp paprika

1 1/2 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp celtic sea salt

1/2 tsp white pepper

1 tsp of finely chopped fresh oregano

a tiny sprinkle of chilli flakes (I couldn’t make it spicy as the kids were eating it, but you could add 2 tsp of chilli powder instead if you like).

I put all of these in a pan, mixed it around and they cooked down beautifully.

On the table I put:

Large Iceberg leaves, the bowl-like middle-outer ones.

Grated cheese (we eat cheese, but if you don’t I think you could use tofu-cheese?)

Sliced tomato

The chicken in the pan.

(I also had sour cream in the fridge but forgot to put it out!).

The kids absolutely LOVED making up their parcels, using the lettuce leaves as wraps. The youngest said that hers was like a burger, which it was! I rediscovered my love of ‘daggy icebergs’- their crispness and crunchiness is yum! I realised that what I loved most about tacos was actually the combination of meat, icebergs and cheese anyway. And unlike tacos which crack and fall apart as you are eating them, this was relatively tidy eating (even for my 2 yr old!).

Meal 3: Chicken and vegetable soup.

On the third night, I placed half of the chicken stock that was produced in the slow-cooker, along with fresh garlic and ginger, fresh oregano and pretty much every vegetable that I had in the fridge!

I used:

Silverbeet, finely chopped

Green beans

Broccoli

Sliced spring onions

Carrot

It produced a very healthy-looking green vegetable soup with a lovely flavour. Upon serving, we added the last remaining ‘marinated’ chicken to each bowl and sprinkled it with fresh Parmesan. For a ‘healthy’ soup it was very tasty and filling with the chicken. My husband and children enjoyed a sourdough spelt bread with theirs while I had my amazing can’t-live-without-it Almond and Chia bread. All, of course, with lashings of real butter!

So there you go. No outlandish claims of 7, 8 or 9 meals but instead three solid meals from one organic chicken. All thanks to my lovely friend!

Do you have a better method for roasting chicken?

Do you refer to Chickens as ‘Chooks’ outside of Australia?

Let me know! x