Pot Chicken

Pot chicken is a strange name for a dish, but think of “Pot Roast” except with chicken. That is what my daughter’s friend Michelle called this one night while having this dish with us.  We didn’t really have a name for it yet and I thought “Pot Chicken?”what a great name! Thanks Michelle!

This dish started out as a crock pot dish, but my crock pot wasn’t big enough to hold everything I wanted to add to it, so I started making this in the oven. The idea is the same. Throw everything in and let it cook in the oven at a low setting for a long, unattended time. Run around town, watch a field hockey game, drive to dance class, make another trip to the high school and it will be cooking while you are gone. I cook this in 2 parts, first just the chicken, then an hour before I want to eat it, I add the vegetables.

This dish will make your house smell incredible. There is a ton of garlic in the dish and you will smell the garlic in your house even the next day. I love garlic, and love the smell. I hope you do, too.

This chicken is even better leftover because the flavors have even more time to blend. And when you reheat in the microwave, it is very hard to overheat since it is almost impossible to overcook.

Ingredients

1  7-8 lb. Chicken – whole

½ lb. pound of garlic – peeled (sells garlic, already peeled, in a plastic, deli like container.) This is about 3 bulbs.

5-6 onions – about the size of tennis balls, peeled and quartered

1  14.5 oz. can of chicken broth

½ cup of white cooking wine

2 tsp. black pepper

1 tsp. dried thyme

1 tsp salt

6 white potatoes or a combination of white and sweet – peeled and cut in half

1 large bag of baby carrots

2 cups of frozen peas

Rinse the chicken and remove the skin. My least favorite thing to do when cooking is removing chicken skin – yuck.  But chicken skin is so greasy, you really need to remove as much as possible. Put the chicken in a large roasting pan. Add the cooking wine and chicken broth. Sprinkle the seasonings on the chicken and into the broth. Then add the garlic. Place a lot of the cloves in the chicken cavity; place garlic in between the legs and the body.

Place as many garlic cloves on the chicken as you can get to stay in place. Put the rest of the garlic in the broth. The garlic that doesn’t end up in the broth but remains on top of the chicken will get roasted and taste just a little different from the garlic that cooks in the broth – both will be delicious. Add the onions to the pan, placing a few pieces of the onions in the cavity of the chicken as well.  Cover the pan tightly with tin foil. Bake at 275 for 4 hours.

After 4 hours, add the potatoes, carrots and peas and bake for another hour. The chicken will just fall off the bones. When serving, scoop up the garlic cloves and eat them along with the chicken. We fight over the last pieces of garlic in my house. They are so tasty and almost sweet; very delicious.