A First Attempt with the Slow Cooker... Whole Chicken Crock Pot

For a good few years now people have been telling me I MUST get a slow cooker and my Facebook quite often shows me status' of people who have just "chucked" this or that is their slow cooker and it's smelling AMAZING. For the record no one "puts" food in a slow cooker... It's ALWAYS "chucked".

So with the intention that this is going satisfy a long standing curiosity, broaden my cooking repertoire and produce lovely, flakey, tender meat perfect baby led weaned babies to "gum up" I got myself a slow cooker at the weekend.



I got myself (from Sainsburys) a Morphy Richards 5L Slow Cooker. I double checked the insides could go in the dishwasher and paid £49.99. I'll be honest I didn't do a lot of research. This seemed around the price I had in my head, though I am aware you can go as low as £30 for them. It looks nice on my work top and there are precisely TWO buttons, so how wrong can I go right?

Well not far I don't think!

Basically I put a whole (medium) chicken in an oven preheated to 200 for about 20 minutes, beforehand I seasoned with a salt, pepper and paprika. During which time I peeled and halved about 8 Vivaldi potatoes, peeled and cut 4 large carrots in to thick batons, peeled and cut 1 white flesh sweet potato in to big cubes and roughly chopped one white onion. CHUCKED it all in with 2 cloves of crushed garlic and about 700ml of low salt vegetable stock. The chicken came out the oven and sat on top. Then the whole thing went on for 3 hours on "high" and 6 hours on "low". (How these high/low settings translate on to other makes I do not know but from a rough Google on recipes last night the temperatures seem pretty generic.)

Verdict? Mummy thought great, baby thought great and Daddy thought great! Daddy especially thought great as it is his job to load the dishwasher after and there was hardly any dirty dishes! The vegetables were soft enough for baby girl to wolf down and the chicken flaked away like fish so she got a good load of that in too. The stock mixed with the chicken juices and created a wonderful chicken broth. LOVELY! Not to mention the fact that whilst I was "cooking" dinner I tidied the house, did a load of washing, took Euna to her swimming lesson AND went to a friends' for lunch. Beats slaving over a hot stove.

















And the verdict was evidenced by the typical remains of a successful baby led weaning session...