Mexican Style Whole Slow Cooker Chicken

Just before Christmas I purchased this book,Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook from Amazon. I was purchasing the Season I DVD of The Office for CB, I needed to spend $5 more dollars to get the super saver free shipping, so I threw this book in my cart for $11 and with the free shipping and whatnot the grand total for the book was about $5. Not too shabby.

Anyway, I'm in love with my slow cooker, but I very rarely use it because I'm one of those OCD people who has to check every outlet to make sure nothing is plugged in before I leave, I check the stove, like fourteen times before leaving for work (seriously, not kidding) I check things over and over again, so the thought of leaving something plugged in and hot while I'm not home and within arms reach of the fire extinguisher is very difficult for me. Monday, I decided to face this fear head on, it was a holiday for me, but if you've read any of my previous posts you know that work has been a bit of a friggin mad house lately and I am apparently orderly numero uno, so even though it was a holiday I had to go in for about four hours to get things ready for this weeks shit fest of proposals and interview stuff. Before I headed to work I decided I decided to try to make the Mexican Style Whole Chicken recipe out of the slow cooker book. CB's new year's resolution is to bring lunch to work more often so that we can save money, or at least not waste money on lunch during the week. So, the whole chicken seemed perfect for him to make chicken sandwiches, chicken salad etc., and it also gave me the opportunity to leave the slow cooker going for four hours, without me being home, easing myself into leaving it on for a whole 8 hours during a regular workday.

I started by preparing the bird which consisted of cleaning the terrible horrible carcass. I say this because I've never done this before, and the chicken seemed too infant like in my hands, and the fact that I could see it's little spinal cord when I was cleaning it made it almost impossible for me to work with it. However, once I was done cleaning it and was now only looking at the outside of the bird, it seemed much easier.

I salt/pepper the inside and outside of the bird, then cut a lime and squeezed the juice from the lime all over the out side of the chicken, then put the lime rinds inside the cavity. I then put two whole cloves of garlic inside the chicken and a big handful of cilantro springs. This is what it looked like at that point.

Then I simply put the slow cooker on low and cooked for 8 hours. When the chicken was done it completely fell off the bone in the slow cooker, I needed to take it our in pieces. And the meat was very juicy and had a wonderful cilantro flavor. The chicken also made a lot of stock which I made into a nice gravy, which also retained some of the cilantro flavor and made for an interesting accompaniment to the chicken. I highly recommend this way of cooking chicken.

Recipe:
1 whole roaster chicken (3-4 pounds) juice of one lime handful of fresh cilantro sprigs salt and pepper

Clean the chicken inside and out, pat dry and then season with salt and pepper. Put chicken in slow cooker and cover with the juice of the lime, then place rinds in cavity. Place the garlic clove and fresh cilantro in cavity as well. Cover and cook on low for 7-8 hours.