Chicken with Gravy

I'm am SO excited about this! Here is THE easiest way to make a whole chicken and gravy to go along with it!!!!

To be honest, before I found this way to make a chicken, I was scared to make whole chickens. Everytime I made one, it made a mess of my oven because of the splattering and the outside would get too done while the inside not done enough. Then when the chicken finally did get done, I had to take it out of the pan and scrap the pan to get the drippings, melt butter, add flour, drippings, etc etc to make the gravy. (I still make gravy that way if I make a roast, but I make chickens way more than I make roasts, so that is why this is so cool!)

I talked to a lot of different people, including 'wiser' and 'older' women and still nothing helped me to make chickens easier!

THEN.....

I ordered this homesteading DVD that shows a bunch of basic homesteading skills from anything from planting a garden, butchering a chicken, making butter, etc and it just happened to have a meal preparation portion on the DVD that showed how this particular lady made her chicken dinners and I have done it each time since (I only found this a couple months ago!) and the results have been AMAZING!

Here's the scoop!......

FIRST.....(this is THE COOLEST part and something I NEVER even thought of before!) is that you take the chicken directly out of the freezer WITHOUT thawing it! The reason why I think this is the coolest part is because I would ALWAYS forget to take the chicken out the night before so during the day I'd be thinking about the chicken we are having for supper, just to realize I didn't take the chicken out to thaw and then I would have to find something else to have for supper that night. With this, you can take the chicken out right when you're ready to cook it!

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Okay, so you take the chicken out of the freezer and put it in a roasting pan, breast-side down. The pan was something else that I had problems with before! I was using a roasting pan with no cover or just a shallow 9x13 pan or something like that since some women were telling me those would work fine. Well, I found a better way! I bought one of those black speckled roasting pans that has a big lid on it and it works wonders! Best $13.99 I spent!

So with the frozen chicken breast-side down in the roasting pan, pour about 4-5 cups of water over the chicken. (I use about 4-5lbs chickens, if they are bigger you would neeed to adjust). After the water is poured over the chicken, dice up an onion and put it in the pan, with some of the pieces sitting on top of the chicken. Then sprinkle the chicken and surrounding water with salt, pepper, paprika, garlic powder and a pinch of basil. Put the cover on the pan and throw the sucker into the oven and in 2-1/2 hours, voila!, a perfectly cooked chicken!!!

Gravy

And for the gravy (this is another cool part!), just take the chicken out of the pan after it is cooked and set on a plate to be cut up, etc and dump all the liquid from the roasting pan into another pan to go onto the stove. I usually will strain out about half of the onion chucks so the gravy isn't so chunky, but that's just a personal preference, do what you like! So once you dump the liquid into the pan, bring it to a boil. While you are waiting for it to boil, mix together about 1/3 cup cold water with a few tablespoons of corn startch (or flour) and once the liquid is boiling, slowly stir the corn startch mixture with a whisk until it thickens as you like it. Add a little salt and pepper if you desire and there's your gravy! It's SOOOOO easy!!! And it tastes amazing because of all the chicken drippings that flowed into the water while it was cooking!

So there ya go! With about 2 minutes of prep before and about 5 minutes of 'work' after with thickening the gravy, you have an impressive chicken dinner that everyone will love! (You can use the time while the chicken is in the oven to get your potatoes cut up. Just leave them in cold water until you are ready to boil!)

Happy Chicken Making!