I’m really enjoying my slow cooker at the moment, quick preparation and then the house fills with lovely cooking smells for hours. (My wife says it smells like her grandparents house when there’s something in the slow cooker.) This is a simple chicken casserole I knocked up the other day, slightly spiced with the chilli. Next time I’m under instructions to remove the skin, and use separate bones which can be removed before serving… then it’ll bump up the approval rating to 3 apparently.
Serves 4, preparation time ½ hr, cooking time 6 hrs, 2/4 (marred, for my wife, by the skin and bone fiddling).
Ingredients
- 6 free range chicken legs/thighs
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 2 small to medium potatoes, sliced
- 1 sml leek, chopped
- 2 small onions, chopped
- Red chilli, deseeded
- Small bunch of thyme twigs, tied with string
- 1 bulb fennel, chopped
- ½ bottle white wine
- ¼ pint chicken stock
Preparation
- (I had large chicken leg and thigh pieces, so halved them with a cleaver)
- Wash and cut the potato into slices the thickness of a pound coin
- Wash and chop carrots into rounds the thickness of a couple of a thumb
- Wash and roughly chop the leek into rounds about the thickness of a thumb
- Peel and finely chop the onion
- Deseed and chop the chilli into four or so pieces lengthways and crossways to expose the flesh into the casserole
- Lay the potato slices into a layer at the bottom (I read somewhere that the bottom of a slow cooker can overheat meat at the bottom, so I like to think of this as a layer of insulation)
- Brown off the chicken in a pan, with the garlic and onion
- Put the chicken in the slow cooker on the layer of potato, and tuck the chilli and thyme in around it
- Pop the rest of the vegetables on top
- Drain the oil out of the pan
- Deglaze the pan with the white wine, scraping up any caramelised chicken from the bottom
- Pour the wine into the slow cooker and top up with chicken stock
- Put the slow cooker on high for 2 hours, then switch to low for 4 hours (or more)
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