Let me be completely honest, cooking chicken totally wigs me out! I’m just not good at handling it and then trimming makes me gag. I know it is usually trimmed but there are some parts of a chicken breast that the butchers just don’t trim to my liking then I end up throwing out practically half a chicken breast because I hack the crap out of it. So, that is a big reason why you rarely see me cooking chicken that’s not ground up already or isn’t a rotisserie chicken.
For some odd reason I read about cooking a whole chicken in the slower cooker and decided I was going to do that. I went to Aldi and they have a line of poultry items that is called Never Any and it doesn’t contain antibiotics or hormones, etc etc. Silly me forgot to see how many pounds of chicken I bought but it cost me around $6 and it was $1 and some change per pound. Therefore, the whole chicken I brought home was around 5lbs.
#1 I took out the giblet disgusting stuff inside the thing, holy disgusting! One other time I cooked a whole chicken at my parents house, and by saying I cooked it, I pretty much just threw the vegetables in the bottom of the roasting pan and watched it bake in the oven, my mom did the rest.
#2 I rinsed off the chicken like the directions said and then dried it with paper towels. Not sure why you have to rinse off the chicken, I don’t do that with chicken breasts so that’s a little strange.
#3 I sliced up a white onion and threw that in the bottom of my slow cooker (if I ever did this again maybe I would put some other veggies along with the onion).
#4 I mixed up seasoning to rub all over the chicken. In a bowl I mixed together, 2 tsp salt and paprika, 1 tsp onion powder and thyme and garlic powder, 1/2 tsp black pepper.
#5 I started to rub the seasoning on the chicken and it didn’t stick as well as I would have liked so I put it in the slow cooker in case any of the seasoning fell off it would just land in the onions instead of on my counter.
#6 I let that thing cook its little heart out on low for 5 hours but silly old me didn’t have the chicken in the right way so every time I went to check the temperature I was hitting bone and was so confused as to what I was doing. Make sure you have that chicken breast side up people, unlike me!
My chicken is hacked up because I kept cutting into it because I realized my food thermometer was broken and had no idea if it was done or not. In the end it doesn’t look as lovely as a rotisserie chicken does when you buy it at the store or all those gorgeous turkey birds that people can cook but it tasted great to me!
Would I do this again? Hmmmm, yes and no! I do like the idea of controlling how the chicken is prepared, with seasonings and such but I could get a cooked rotisserie chicken at Wegmans for $4.99 (not organic), the organic ones at Wegmans are ranging from $10-$13 so I guess I saved money in that my chicken didn’t have antibiotics, etc but the uncooked whole chicken is gross!
Testing and Trying My Thirties 