chicken

I love chicken. I really do. I used to purchase frozen boneless and skinless SCD legal chicken breasts, but eventually I got tired of them being totally tasteless. Plus, they're expensive.

So, here's a great way to cut your chicken costs.

Look for sale prices on SCD legal, bone-in chicken breasts. I've seen several legal brands of these available fresh. Foster Farms and Sanderson Farms are two brands local to me (I live in Los Angeles).

Much of the time, I can get these for $2 per pound regular price, and 99 cents per pound while on sale!

But of course, this is an SCD blog. And one of the major themes of SCD is "make it yourself"!

This overwhelms a lot of people, but the secret to surviving is to buy, and cook, in bulk.

So! Here is about 10 pounds worth of bone-in chicken breasts, ready to go into the oven. I can fit two 9x13 glass pans side by side on the top shelf, and I have a slightly larger glass pan that I put on the bottom shelf.



I cook these at 450 degrees for about an hour and fifteen minutes. There's no need to cover them if you leave the skin on.

I was going to take a picture of the chicken after it cooked, but I forgot. Sorry!

Anyway, what I usually do is I cook all of this chicken. Then, I personally eat all of the skin. This is a meal for me, because my son is the only child in the history of the universe who does not like chicken skin. I know, I know. What is the world coming to?

After the chicken has had time to cool down, I pull all the meat off and store it like so in the refrigerator:



This way, I have food for at least four days or so, and it took at most an hour of work total. I eat it on salads, or alone with olive oil, salt and pepper. You will have to re-season it, though, since most of the seasoning was probably on the chicken skin.

Once you've eaten chicken breast off the bone, I swear that you will never want to go back to frozen chicken breasts. This stuff tastes WAY better.

And guess what else? You can save all those bones to make the best chicken stock ever. If I'm not ready to make stock, I just throw all the bones and leftover little pieces of chicken and cartilage and stuff into large ziploc bags for later use. Occasionally I'll just throw a bunch of bones in the crock pot and let it cook all night long.

So there you go -- cheap, fast, easy, delicious (and convenient) chicken!

Jamaican Jerk chicken... crock pot style

I really should not be writing this.

I'm in the midst of a very big project, I'm supposed to be working on a LONG self-paced training session, I've got scripts to read, and a newsletter to lay out.

Sigh.

But I had to share this recipe with you.

My family recently moved to a nice new neighborhood, and my husband had the good fortune to try out Zankou chicken. He had never eaten hummus, or tabbouleh, or anything like that, and I got jealous because I was missing all sorts of ethnic foods.

First, I want to mention that if you do want to try out some more ethnic recipes, try out Raman Prasad's cookbook here. I've been meaning to do a proper review but my food tolerances have only recently gotten to the point where I can actually try some of the recipes I really want to try.

But anyway, I started poking around on the Internet and I stumbled across Jamaican Jerk chicken.

I read several recipes before deciding to attempt it. I made it at first in a skillet without marinating it first, because I didn't have time for that. It was OK.

But then the long traditional marination time struck me as something useful for a crock pot.

Of course it's not barbecued like true Jamaican Jerk chicken would be, but it's still pretty good.

The interesting thing is, my son LOVES this chicken. It's spicy as all get out, but then I realized that most of the heat is in the sauce. In the crock pot, this dish becomes extremely saucy. So as long as I went easy on the sauce when I served it to my guy, he was fine and ended up eating three bowls!

By the way, if you've never gotten smoked paprika, you are missing out. It's delicious. I buy the big McCormick brand at Costco. It's not spicy but it helps to impart a smoky flavor. Yum!

JAMAICAN JERK CROCK POT CHICKEN

4-6 fresh chicken thighs with bones (about 3 pounds)
6 cloves garlic, thrown in whole
1-2 onions, chopped
2 tbsp smoked paprika
1 tbsp oil
1 tbsp original Tabasco (only the original is SCD legal)
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2 tbsp honey
1-2 tsp allspice (I did not have this)

Put all ingredients in the crock with the chicken on the bottom. Cook on high for about six hours. Done!

Personally I think putting some spinach in the crock would taste really good, but there wasn't enough room in my crock to do that (I have a 4 quart one).

As I mentioned, I did not have allspice. Until recently I thought allspice was a blend of spices. Well, it isn't! It's a single spice and as we know, single spices without additives are legal. Allspice is a traditional jerk chicken spice.

Oh, and one more thing -- you'll probably need to add more salt at the end to the individual bowls of food. When you cook anything for a long time with salt added, the salty taste fades, even though the sodium content of the food remains the same. So you end up adding way more salt than you need to if you add a lot at the start of cooking.

Enjoy!