Best to start it the night before by brining the chicken: Mix 1/4 c kosher salt (or 2 T regular salt) with 1 pint of water. Pour this into the bag that the chicken is in, push out the air, and close it tight. Leave the chicken in brine in the fridge overnight. If you do this, you probably want to cut down on the salt in the recipe below.
In the morning, pour out the brine and cut up the chicken, then follow this recipe:
3-4 lb stewing hen or rooster, cut up*
2-4 carrots, sliced
2 onions, coarsely chopped
2-4 celery stalks with leaves, coarsely chopped
4-8 potatoes, peeled and chopped
1 1/2 to 2 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
3-7 c water
1/2 to 1 tsp dried basil or thyme (or 1/2 to 1 Tb fresh, chopped) (**or see below our new spice mixture)
1 1/2 c brown rice cooked in 3 c water
Put half the vegetables in bottom of crock pot. Cover with chicken pieces. Pour in enough water to cover chicken. Top with salt, pepper, and spices, then remaining vegetables. Cover and cook on Low for 7 to 10 hours. Cook rice in separate pot.
Two options for eating:
1. Put rice on plate, put vegetables and broth on top, put chicken pieces to the side, eat chicken with fingers. Best for legs and thighs.
2. Remove chicken pieces from crock-pot, allow to cool, pull meat and skin off bones and discard bones and cartilage. Break up meat and skin into bite-size pieces and return it to the broth. Then mix rice into crock-pot and serve in bowls. This is best for bony pieces and for breast meat, which is somewhat dry if not broken up into the soup.
*We leave the fat pad in the belly of the hen if it is still attached. Since these are pasture-raised hens, their fat is full of Omega 3’s so it is very good for you. If you don’t want that much fat in your stew/soup, you can remove the fat pad from the belly (and other fat deposits that you find when cutting up the hen) and render the fat separately to use in other recipes. The way we do it is to cut up the fat into cubes and put it in another small crock pot set on low for most of the day (we use a tiny crock pot called The Little Dipper that came with our big crock pot.) The fat is done rendering when the cracklings in it are brown and crispy but not burned. Let the fat cool a bit, then filter it through a piece of cheesecloth into a jelly jar. Keep it in the fridge and use it instead of butter for frying eggs and other uses.
** Lately we have been using this Israeli spice mixture instead of the basil or thyme and black pepper in this recipe. It is called "Baharat". These are the amounts we use for one stewing hen, all are ground: 1/4 t black pepper, 1/4 t corriander, 1/4 t cinnamon, 1/8 t cloves, 1/8 t allspice, 1/2 t cumin, 1/4 t cardamon, 1/8 t nutmeg.