I mean, this crock pot! It makes it so easy to cook excellent dinners even on the days when we as a family have the least time to spend to prepare it.
we always plan the week on sundays. And during this weeks planning we saw that Tuesday would be a day with minimal time for foodpreparation, so that made it the perfect day for a crockpot dinner. Since we had a nice whole chicken in the freezer, we took it out on Sunday and put to thaw in the fridge until Tuesday morning.
This was our preparation horizon for Tuesday’s dinner:
- Sunday – pick chicken out of the freezer. Duration 1 minute
- Monday night before bedtime – allocate all dry ingredients and the crockpot. Duration 5 minutes (can be done in combination with brushing your teeth….)
- 5 dried carnations
- 3 star anise
- 1 apple
- 1 onion
- Salt
- Tuesday morning just before 8am – prepare the chicken for the crockpot. Duration 15 minutes
- wipe the chicken with paper
- Salt the chicken inside and outside
- Roughly chop apple and onion
- Mix with carnations and star anise
- Fill the chicken
- Tie the chicken.
- Put in crockpot and turn on low heat 8 hours
- Tuesday night anytime after 4 p.m., the chicken is ready. Feel free to place a click of butter (e.g. 25g) to melt on top of the chicken in the crockpot (the fat-free breast pieces could otherwise be dry).
- Preparation of side dishes can be skipped if you have ensured left overs from previous days. If you want to make something fresh there and then try this, raw red cabbage salad – that’ll take approximately 30 min if you make it from scratch.
- When the side dish is ready, the chicken can be picked from the crockpot and divided into portions before served. I Promise it’ll just fall apart…. take the filling aside and put that back in crockpot.
Serve:
We also had a cold lime sauce and a creamy point cabbage salad available for dinner. Anything that can be done in a larger batch and eaten for several days are great as complimentary to the chicken.
- After dinner – Collect the bones after you eat and put it all back in the crockpot. Top up with boiling water so everything is covered and put the crockpot on high temperature for an additional 3-4 hours (or low all through the night if that works better)
- when ready, strain the goo from the broth and place the broth to cool.
Once cold you have a perfect spicy shaky chicken broth that contains, not only a lot of good gelatin, glycine (and the other GAGs) and sulfur, but also a good dose of pectin – things that are good for both the liver, gut, skin and joints.
What’s not to like ??
