Eight Acres

I am often asked about how we cook our homegrown chickens.  Many people assume that they are all tough and need to be stewed.  Its true that the older chickens can be tough, but the extra roosters that we hatch and kill after 9-12 months are tender enough to roast and very tasty.  We cook the roast chicken in our webber BBQ, in a roasting dish with some chicken stock (I usually forget to defrost it, but it melts as the dish heats up), and the cavity stuffed with herbs and garlic.  Just cook the chicken for a couple of hours on medium heat and use the stock to make delicious gravy.  The bones can then be used to make more stock in the slow cooker. I can never get the legs to fold back like supermarket chickens! For the older hens and roosters, I usually portion the chicken as I'm butchering.  I keep the legs and thighs for casserole, and the breast meat for mince.  We usually use the mince for meat balls, with either a tomato or creamy sauce. ...

My slow cooker has become one the most useful tools in my kitchen for producing real food that is also tasty and cheap.  I use the slow cooker most often for four different dishes: Making Stock I used to think making stock was too hard.  And when I read Nourishing Traditions it sounded ever more difficult because the recommendation was to cook the stock for 12-24 hours, rather than just 2-3 hours I had read before.  I couldn't figure out how to make stock for that long.  Then I saw on a blog somewhere that I could use my slow cooker (sorry I can't link back, I forget where now, but this is another good example ).  I felt so stupid that I didn't think of this myself!!  It is so easy and you don't have to worry about burning the house down.  I keep bones and vege scraps in a bag in the freezer and when I start to run low on stock (or if we cook a roast chicken), I'll load up the slow cooker with everything from the freezer, add a carrot, onion, an...