So I haven’t been posting since October for a few reasons.  I made the decision to apply to graduate school, I started a new job, I attempted to succeed more mindfully at my old jobs, I got a new kitchen floor, I became a finalist in the 44th Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest (which is more time consuming than it should be) and I wanted to think more about what I’m cooking and eating before I wrote about it.

That doesn’t mean I’ve been fasting since October 3.  Au contraire, fair reader.  I have instead been eating a lot of the same thing.  Three bean chili, chikpea cutlets from Veganomicon, egg salad sandwiches, steamed spinach, and homemade pizza have been staples in the Maiden Street kitchen.  I also took the show on the road last weekend and made pot pie from scratch (or close to it — we did use puff pastry for the crust) with my Mother in Maryland.

In the interest of energy efficiency and using cheap ingredients I’ve been trying to learn new things to cook in my slow cooker.  I have a slow cooker similar to this one; oval, 6.5 quarts, with a penchant for cooking food hotter than I would like.  In order to adequately cook for two in this slow cooker is a big challenge.  Fortunately I borrowed a copy of “Not Your Mother’s Slow-Cooker” from my mother (hello, irony) last weekend.  This cookbook is pretty good in that it’s huge and has recipes for just about everything you’d want to cook.  It even has a section on bread machine pizza crust.  I don’t know the connection between bread machine pizza crust and slow cookers but I do like a good recipe for pizza.  Though I don’t have (or want) a bread machine.

The cookbook also contains size guidelines for each recipe and suggest which shape and size slow-cooker works best.  Fortunately beans seem to cook well in all sizes/shapes if you get the water ratio right so we’ve been making many bean-based recipes.  Last week we started off with winter vegetables, white beans, and a poached chicken on Tuesday and ate leftovers in various combinations for a day or two.  It wasn’t a particularly photogenic recipe (poached chicken looks pretty gross) but it was moderately tasty.  I peeled and cubed a small butternut squash, a few carrots, 2 potatoes, a large onion, and a few parsnips and dropped them in the slow cooker with a few cloves of garlic (smashed) and about a tablespoon of fresh thyme.  Let’s be honest, I didn’t measure it.  It was left over from Thanksgiving and you can’t really have too much of it so I just dropped “some” in still on the stems.  I’ve since learned you should add fresh herbs at the end of cooking (as opposed to dried that do well in the slow-cooker from the beginning) but they did look very pretty and they didn’t make it taste worse so no harm done.

I then skinned a chicken (a 4lb. “roaster” that had been sitting in my freezer for way too long), put half of a lemon (sliced) into it’s cavity, and snuggled it into the veggies in the slow cooker.  Then I added about a cup of water (again later I learned this would be a mistake) and set it on low to crock for about 6 hours.  In the last hour I added beans I had pre-cooked and some salt and pepper.

The chicken was delicious and shreddable and the veggies were done well after 6 hours or so but man there was a LOT of liquid.  I saved it to cook with beans later (what, throw it away? never!) but it made the whole process rather messy.  Whole chickens, especially when poached, do not hold together very well and then make big splashy messes when you drop them back into the cooker.  Or at least when I drop them back into the cooker.

I have learned several things about cooking a whole chicken in the slow cooker.  I will share them with you.

1. It might be the easiest way in the world to cook a chicken without having to think about how done it is (and knowing it will be cooked through) and still having tender meat.

2. That said the meat does have a different texture than if you roast it.  I’m OK with that for burritos and soup…But it’s not an all purpose way of cooking chicken.

3. Roasting makes a more appealing result.  It’s also easier to separate the “juice” from the fat; the slow cooker seemed to muddle it all together which was delicious but sort of gross the next day when there was chicken fat on the squash chunks.

4. I need to cook more stuff that comes out of the freezer.

5. Add more thyme (or add the thyme) at the end.  It would have looked pretty and tasted good.

Tomorrow’s adventure: Black Eyed Peas “Southwestern” style from “Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker.”

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