40 garlic chicken
I’ve got a chicken in the crockpot, it’s been going for a couple of hours, still needs a couple. For the first time I am trying it without adding a lot of liquid to it. My friend Mari is the one who told me that I could do a whole chicken in the crockpot. We just didn’t use one when I was a kid. But a few years ago, just after she’d told me about cooking a whole chicken in one I was at Meijer and they had this crockpot on sale for $10 and whole chickens were on sale that week too! Kismet!
Anyhow, whenever I make chicken in the crockpot, I will throw in a few cloves of sliced garlic. We love garlic around here! Today, I was reminded of the first time I made “garlic chicken”.
I was either 18 or 19. Mom and Dad hadn’t been split up for too long, so I hadn’t been the chief cook for very long. I was still feeling my way through things and learning. Heck, I’m STILL learning, I always will be. I like learning new stuff, especially about food.
It was Christmas day and it had snowed something like 12 inches overnight. The roads were a nightmare. So, instead of making the traditional trip to my Gran’s house (90 minutes each way over very curvy mountain roads) I decided to stay home. This was an unheard of luxury for me. It might have been the very first time I’d ever missed Christmas with the whole famn-damily.
I looked through the cookbook for something that I could do with a couple of chicken breasts for dinner since I had a bag full in the freezer. I found a recipe for something along the lines of “40 garlic chicken”. In those days I had not yet discovered fresh garlic. The only garlic I’d ever used was the dried/powdered kind. You see where this is going, don’t you?
I read on the bottle that blah blah teaspoons equals a clove of garlic. I used enough of the dried crap to be 40 cloves worth and covered the chicken with it and put in the oven. I have to say, that was pretty gross. We didn’t eat very much of it, that’s for sure. *laughs*
I’ve come pretty far since then. Now I’m almost never without a bulb or three of fresh garlic in the house and I only use powdered garlic when I’m making a seasoned flour for coating something. I don’t even keep the pre-chopped stuff in the fridge anymore. (it has a slightly pickled flavor that I don’t care for)
My chicken smells great, I am looking forward to it being done.
October 27th, 2013 at 10:52 pm
patt got me into making crock pot chicken … so once every week or every other week one of us would say to the other, “how about we just throw a couple of boobies in the crock pot” so we would do that and have a yummy chicken and dressing dish. i still do it.