Cluck cluck

Since we did beer butt chickens and had the carcasses left it was time to make chicken stock! Good thing too since I used up ours making dumplings and chicken pot pie this week. And just a side note- if you smoke the chickens skip making stock with those ones. It will be bit smokey flavored stock if you do use them. Not that I've done that or anything ;)

I use Alton Brown's recipe: Chicken Stock. We love Alton :) really the only thing I changed off the recipe was I didn't use a leek because I may have forgotten to buy one...whoops. And we put cheese cloth over a mesh colander to strain it since we don't have a fine strainer.

Cooling stock (ignore the disgusting stove top, it didn't get cleaned up yet):

Beer Butt Chicken

Nom time :) we made beer butt chickens tonight for dinner. Even Z baby ate it! And she rarely eats anything beyond fruit and sweets! 

This is one of those recipes where we just sorta wing it. I never thought we had many of those recipes but apparently I just don't pay attention. So what we do is take a can of beer. Drink about half. And for the love of goodness don't waste good beer please! Use a cheaper beer for this! We then chop up some onion and garlic and stick it in the can with the beer. We've added other stuff in the past as well, but these two are always in there. Feel free to play with different flavors. I think we've even thrown butter in too. Anyways. We then stick the can in one of THESE type things. They have worked well for us. Throw your chicken that you've cleaned up over the top of it. We then pat on some EVOO all over the chickies, sprinkle with some garlic salt, pepper and paprika. Again you can sprinkle on whatever you want, fun to play with! Then in the oven it goes. Be sure to put it on a pan with sides as the chickies will juice a bit and no one wants that all over their oven :) We stick it in at 350, stick a temp probe in it and wait till it comes up to temp, I believe you want it to be at least 165 internal temp. We did 2 chickies last night and it took around an hour and a half. Taking it off the can thing can be a lil tricky, I recommend having help! Let the chicks rest a few minutes and then have one person stab the chick on either side with forks while the other person uses forks to hold down the beer can/ metal holder thingy as it will tend to stick to it. I've seen to spray the metal thing and beer can with cooking spray before putting the chicken on and cooking which we have tried but it didn't make a difference for us. Maybe I didn't use enough spray, who knows. But nonetheless it's never been too horribly difficult to get the chicks off the can contraption. Carve those suckers up and enjoy! Next posts will be chicken pot pie with the leftovers! And also chicken stock using up the carcasses :)