I was looking for an easy way to make a decent amount of chicken and nothing is easier than cooking with the slow-cooker, so I set out to search for a recipe for slow-cooking a whole chicken. I googled around and didn't find a lot that looked interesting taste-wise, but what I did find was a sauce for a roast chicken recipe that sounded great, so using this and adapting it a bit for the slow-cooker I came up with the recipe outlined below. It's pretty much like all slow-cooker recipes with the majority of the work being the prep followed by throwing all the ingredients in the cooker and setting it to high and walking away, eazy peazy. Two and a half hours later you have delicious chicken that's falling off the bone. So lets start with the ingredients:

• 1 whole organic chicken (3-4 pounds)
• 3 onions (quartered)
• 3 celery stalks (cut in thirds)
• 3 carrots (cut in thirds)
• 1 lemon
• 3 fresh bay leaves
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 3 sprigs of rosemary
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp pastured butter (room temp)

Start with cutting up the vegetables.

Generally your chicken will come stuffed with some goodies inside it, such as the neck and gizzards, and such. These are great and should be saved for other uses which we won't get into here now but I will write a follow up later on how to make use of the offal.

Cut your lemon in half and squeeze the juice from the halves over the chicken. Place the fresh bay leaves in the cavity of the chicken followed by the rinds of the lemon.

Next place your cut up vegetables around the chicken.

Since we are slow-cooking the chicken the skin wont get that golden look to it you may be used to seeing when roasting a chicken in the oven. First we can dash some paprika on top and this will give some color to our chicken and it wont look ghastly white when done. This is optional but worked well the last time I made this recipe: I set the oven to 500 degrees and placed the chicken (seasoned with salt and pepper and with a few dashes of paprika on top) in the oven for 10-15mins to brown it before placing it in the slow-cooker.

Next I mix up the sauce in a small bowl. Combine the garlic, rosemary, olive oil, and butter.

Here's how it looks after 2 hours of cooking, I would have taken a nice shot of it on a plate but the moment I tried to move or pick the chicken up it was falling apart!