Crockpot-to-Oven Herb Roast Chicken

I have a wonderful new thing, an electric slow cooker. 'Aubergine' coloured crock pots were on sale on Amazon and I had always wanted one so I could throw some things in to cook before going to work and come home to a good meal. It would be especially useful for pot roasts and things which take a long time to cook.

The first thing I decided to make with the crock pot is herb roast chicken. I adapted this from Bon Appetit Y'all, which is turning out to be a good book for excellent basic recipes like roast chicken and pot roast.

Ensure that the chicken cavity is empty, and devoid of internal organs etc.

Prepare 200ml of chicken stock or you can use water - I made my stock up from half a cube.

Have three bowls prepared, one for the chicken rub, chicken cavity, and onions.

Use a mixture of dried herbs - I used marjoram, sage and thyme - freshly ground black pepper and salt for both the chicken rub and chicken cavity mix. I also added cayenne pepper to the chicken rub mix.

Peel four garlic cloves and add to the chicken cavity mix. Add two dried bay leaves.

Quarter a lemon and remove the seeds. Place on top of the chicken cavity mix.

Slice and wash two red onions. Line the bottom of the crockpot with the onion slices.

Put in the 200ml chicken stock or water.

Put on some plastic gloves. Rub the herb chicken rub mix all over the chicken. Rub the chicken cavity mix all over the inside of the cavity. Squeeze lemon juice into the cavity, and place the lemon quarters inside. Put the bay leaves in.

Lift the herbed chicken into the crockpot.

Put some pats of butter on the chicken - I used Lurpak garlic butter.





Cook on high for an hour then reduce to low and cook for five hours.

Do other things. It was a lovely sunny day so I went to the park with James. We had ice-creams.

Five hours later, return to the kitchen and check on your chicken. It will smell amazing.



It is time to prepare your vegetables.

Turn on the oven and pre-heat to 180 deg Celsius.

I used new potatoes which I washed throughly and boiled.



I really hate peeling carrots so I used Chantenay carrots. All I had to do was top and tail them and cut them in half.





Also washed and boiled these.

When the vegetables are ready, transfer them to a roasting tin with some canola oil, black pepper and cayenne pepper.



Prepare a larger, chicken-sized roasting tin.

Turn off the crock pot and remove the chicken to the tin. I put additional pats of garlic butter on the chicken. At the moment the chicken is cooked, but looks a bit pale with soggy skin. As always, crispy skin is the goal.



Put both tins in the oven. Roast until ready and chicken skin is crispy.

Everything is roasting - gravy time. This chicken yields a beautiful smelling herbed lemony chicken stock. Ladle some of it into a saucepan for the gravy.



The gravy is super easy. Heat up the pan of stock and add a slurry of flour and water to thicken it up.





The gravy was kind of fatty so I would recommend that you skim the fat off if possible. I did save the rest of the stock from the crockpot and stuck it in the fridge - I plan on scooping the chilled fat off the top and using the skimmed stock for something tomorrow. I got about a pint of stock from that chicken.

The crispy chicken:



Vegetables:



Plate:



The skin on this chicken in particular is very very good because of the encrusted dried herbs and oven-crispness. I wouldn't skip the last half hour in the oven.

I used a chicken weighing about 1kg. This is the smallest whole roasting chicken available and is the maximum size of chicken that fits in a 3.5L crockpot. Half of the chicken was left even though we ate lots, this yields enough food for four meals and even includes a bonus 1 pint of stock which can be used for all kinds of useful things. The chicken itself cost about £5 so I would say it's definitely cheaper to roast your own small whole chicken than getting separate chicken parts, and it makes eating the next day a whole lot easier.

My easy carrot meatball spaghetti

One of the foods I like is meatballs. There's some form of a meat-related ball, eg. potato balls with meat, eaten different ways in what seems like almost every type of cuisine. Meatballs are easy to make successfully and all kinds of flavours can be achieved with different additions to the meatball. I've made Swedish meatballs and kofta, but on Wednesday I made my carrot meatball spaghetti, using everyday larder items and some of the multi-coloured carrots we got with the veg box delivery.

To make the meatballs, I mixed:
400g ground beef
1 tsp dried Italian herbs
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp allspice
1tsp ground black pepper
60ml milk
1 egg
50g breadcrumbs (I used boxed breadcrumbs)

Shape into small balls and placed them in an oiled baking tin. They will need to firm up a bit or they'll fall apart during cooking. I clingfilmed them and put them in the fridge while I continued my preparations.

The carrots came in different colours: purple, white and regular. When peeled the purple carrots were a rich deep purple, almost black, with a bright orange core.

Peeled purple carrot on left

I peeled four carrots and sliced them with my mini food processor.

Quartered two onions and ran them through the food processor again.

Lovely machine-sliced onions. I lack knife skills, but fortunately gadgets exist. Cooking dinner is not Masterchef, lack of knife skills shouldn't deter one from attempting to cook.

I took the meatballs out of the fridge and started frying them in my handy little electrical frying pan. I like it because of the sliding temperature adjuster, which makes me feel safer when cooking things like meatballs. I always worry a bit about cooking them all the way through.


Then put the sliced onions on and fry those together.

While frying and ensuring that the beef is cooked through, I started boiling the spaghetti and washed and quartered four tomatoes. I chucked those on top.

Opened a can of tomatoes and put that in too. I stood over it mixing for some time, making sure everything was cooked and adding pepper. Then I put the lid on, turned the heat down and let it simmer for a while.

Carrot meatball spaghetti.

The purple carrots are better and have more of a sweet carroty taste than regular carrots. I am now a fan of the purple carrot. I could try to grow them despite this year's carrot failure. My carrots looked like little, malformed people.

Pictures, and Harumi Kurihara

I've not been blogging for a long while, and have done some lovely things in the meantime:

Went to the New Forest and was nosed by ponies,



tried to grow carrots and failed,



went to a wedding in Bath,



and discovered Harumi Kurihara.



Harumi Kurihara is a Japanese TV chef and homemaker, known as Japan's Martha Stewart. I've recently bought her second book in English, Everyday Harumi.

She lived in London for a few months when researching her book and the result is doable recipes, with ingredients you can get in London (albeit in Japanese or East Asian supermarkets in London). That means no difficult seafood ingredients (she uses mackerel and sea bream), she gives instructions to fix things that are different (eg. English vs Japanese cucumbers), and provides a recipe that uses those tiny prawn cocktail prawns. I find the best thing about the book is the inclusion of easy, quick pickle recipes ('tsukemono'). I like pickles but haven't got the dedication to make a harvestload of pickles in sterilised jam jars - I would slice some cucumbers and shake them with some liquid in a ziploc bag though.

I tried out one of her recipes I found on the internet before buying Everyday Harumi, as a sort of test. It's an easy chicken recipe using mostly storecupboard ingredients: Chicken with soy and balsamic dressing.

I combined two tablespoons soy sauce (Kikkoman) and two tablespoons balsamic vinegar instead of 1tbsp recommended in the recipe, mixed with 1 sliced garlic clove and ground pepper (I didn't use salt), and marinated the diced chicken breast for half an hour.

Fried that chicken.

I'm using a lovely contraption my mother gave me, a Zojirushi electric frying pan thingy. It has a sliding thing to control the temperature, from simmer to high temperatures, and I don't have to faff about with a flame. When the pan gets hot enough, it stops heating and the little light turns off, so the temperature's kept fairly consistent as well.





I served it on a plate of rocket with a decorative border of cherry tomatoes and we had it with rice, it tasted good and was pretty effortless, except for dicing the chicken. If you bought ready-diced chicken, this recipe's pretty much no work at all.

Result: Tasty chicken, not too strong flavoured. It was really good considering the effort invested in it.

Bonus point: I was able to mix the leftover chicken and 'dressing' with a salad to take to work the next day.



I've been cooking more often and better, so I should be updating this blog more often with things I cook and things. There's a book sale every month or so at the building where I work, and I often get cookbooks from there and have been trying out different recipes. In a bout of excitement I got a pastry book by Michel Roux - I'm very excited about trying to make good pastry. There's a recipe for pizza dough as well but it looks very involved, and instructions include measuring the temperature of the room and the dough and other different things and adding them all up to a specific temperature - and so looks a bit scarier and more exact than I'd trust myself to do, but the pastry ones look a bit more doable.



Greetings from Catfriend.