How to cook an old chicken
Today's experiment in simplicity was cooking
an old rooster. The neighbor of our chicken-slaughtering buddies
asked them if they'd be willing to kill and dress two of his old
roosters for him, but when the neighbor came back and saw what the
dressed chickens looked like --- all legs and no breast --- he said no
thanks and left the roosters behind. Mark and I are always up for
a challenge, so we took one home to cook.
I did some extensive web searching last night, looking for some advice
on how to cook old roosters. Besides "Coq au vin", which looked
like it'd take me hours of hard work to prepare, there didn't seem to
be many choices except hints to cook it slow and long. So I
decided to make up my own chicken stew, basically pretending I was
making chicken stock and then throwing in some extra veggies at the
end.
At 8:30 am, I put the whole rooster in a pot
of water with a few chopped onions and garlic and some parsley and
thyme out of the garden. (I've found that parsley can be
substitued for celery to good effect in nearly all recipes and is much
easier to grow!) Then I slowly simmered the budding stew for
about eight hours.
By then, the meat was falling off the bones and I was able to strain
out the solids and then remove the hard bits easily. I threw all
of the meat back into the juices, added carrots, potatoes, and sweet
potatoes and simmered about half an hour until they were soft.
Then I turned off the heat and threw in some frozen corn and peas from
this summer. A bit of salt and pepper and the stew was
done! A delicious meal for eight out of free ingredients --- our
girls wish we weren't quite so empowered.
| Read other posts about killing and eating your own chickens: |
Our chicken innovations have also included a homemade chicken
waterer.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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