Why is there a question mark in the title?  I realize that I’m spending more time in the “pursuit of clean food” portion of my blog than I am in the Life and Liberty –but perhaps my life of liberty has become clean food?  Anyway, the bottom line is I love to cook, I love finding new recipes and trying them out –and along the way I’m going to try things that perhaps may turn out great –or may turn out not so great –or even suck…..  so I’m sharing, learning and teaching at the same time.  I wish I could talk to Mrs. Ron Paul about this stuff dammit –her and her new gorgeous kitchen that Ron Paul bought her. Someone please tell her to unblock me on facebook!  (that’s another story for another time lol)

Well here goes with the Milk Chicken.  There are quite a few recipes for this on the net and basically they are all the same –but what I got at the end of this I blame on the cast iron Dutch oven that I talked about previously.  Turns out that my little chicken…..sort of melted into a creamy sagey melding of flavors that was almost too flavorful.

Here is the original recipe by chef Jamie Olivers

and here is what I made

1 Soy Free Organic Chicken from the “farm” 2.5 to 3 lbs

10 cloves of organic garlic, unpeeled

1 cinnamon stick stolen from my daughter the holistic massage therapist in training who has a cabinet with her potion ingredients in the basement –the recipe called for a 1/2 stick but I could not figure out how to cut it in half lol

2 1/3 cups of raw milk

1 handful of fresh organic sage (leaves taken off stems)

Zest from 1 lemon –the recipe called for two but I only had one

S&P, butter, olive oil –more milk and a little water at the end.

This was the chicken after I browned it and drowned it in the milk

 First I took the fresh chicken and fried that sucker up in olive oil and butter after I seasoned it with sea salt and pepper and kept turning it over in the cast iron frying pan until all the sides were nice and brown.

I transferred it to the red cast iron Dutch oven and pre-heated the oven to 375 degrees, threw all the ingredients above into the bottom of the pot, put the chicken in the center, and poured the milk over it!

That’s it.  Now I wait.  2 1/2 hours in the pot at 375 degrees….. lets see what comes out…..I’m going to make some mashed potatoes and pour that milk gravy right over it.

 

….or so I thought lol

What the hell is this??

 

OK, so I checked out some pictures of other people trying this recipe and no one else’s looked like mine. Apparently that cast iron Dutch oven is like the terminator of food stuffs –put a chicken in and it disintegrates.  The chicken has the consistency of pulled pork –and that is not such a bad thing but it’s nothing like the recipe said it would be!

After forking off the chicken from the bone I was left with a bowl of bones (which I will use later for bone broth) and I found I had to add a bit of milk and filtered water to continue to cook the chicken on the stove top in order to scrape off some of the brown bits along the side which had a lot of the flavor –why let it go to waste?

Anyway –so now I have two meals for the price of one and it was probably the most flavorful chicken I’ve ever eaten.  It’s also healthy and all that garlic, which disintegrated, will probably stave off any disease for at least a week lol.  I served it with some nice organic, skin-on, mashed potatoes which I made with raw butter and raw sour cream and sea salt and cracked black pepper and I heated up some frozen organic peas from Trader Joe’s.

What pissed me off is that it’s really hard to get all the bones out –probably because it was a pretty small chicken –of course I did not get one bone in my plate but my husband did.  Murphy’s damned laws.  No cook ever wants the people they are serving to get the bones dammit.

Anyway, it really was delicious but I probably won’t be making it again –there are just too many recipes in my future and unless something is so damned good that I need to eat it over and over, I usually try not to make the same thing twice.  So I’m giving this the one-time hat –not that I’ve ever judged anything by hats before or by how many times I’ll make them or will consider making them –but why the hell not? It’s a good idea! lol  This is nothing like my organic linzer tarts that I made for Christmas that I will make over and over again because they were like dying and going to buttery-raspberry-apricot heaven (and I have to make sure that I give them away because the ones that I didn’t give away are a permanent part of my fat ass right now lol)  –oh, here are those linzer tarts…..  I might not tell you how I made those or wait until next year lol

 

UPDATE:

Remember part 2 of that chicken –the bone broth?
Well, I let it simmer on low all through the night and all day. About 18 hours.  I strained it –picked off the chicken pieces that were left and threw them in the broth.  Added whatever I could find in the house –so again, here we have Kitchen Sink Soup lol –maybe I should just name this blog “The Kitchen Sink”.

I added, fresh organic kale. Organic pinto beans.  Organic celery. Three large organic mushrooms –hell everything I use is organic so I’m going to stop saying that word and just assume it’s all organic.
Parmesan cheese, lemon juice, a little bit of apple cider vinegar, parsley, dill, lemon pepper, sea salt and cracked black pepper and left over black rice……. it’s simmering now.  This soup is so healthy we’re probably set with enough vitamins for the month of January with this soup alone 🙂
Going to eat it with some Kalamata Olive Sourdough bread and raw butter.  YUMMY!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gigi Bowman, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Clean Food