Enchilada Chicken

OH RIGHT, The CHICKEN!

I boiled a whole chicken (sans gizzards) for about an hour (with some sea salt, ground pepper and garlic powder) and then picked it out deboned and deskined it, then put all the bones and skin back in the pot to boil for a little longer (hey man, delicious, delicious chicken water). The edible part of the chicken went in the crockpot along with one can of Mexican Style Tomato Sauce, some smoked salt, a minced clove of garlic, a seeded and minced habanero, 2 diced smoke-dried tomatoes, a quartered onion and more ground pepper. I added some of the chicken water to make it kinda soupy so it didn't get all dried out while slow cooking the next day.

I then had a fiasco with the chicken water. I strained the water into a zip-top bag which I had put in a smaller pot for stability purposes. After I strained it and cleaned out the chicken stock pot, I went to grab the zip-top bag and realized there was a hole in the bottom so it was all leaking out. Thankfully it was all leaking out into a pot...but still, now I was going to have to clean THAT pot too. I then got out a brand new zip-top bag--one that had never been used before (yes I reuse my zip-top bags), and then poured the chicken stock into that one. As far as I know it didn't have a hole in it...I guess I should really go check the freezer, eh?

I put the crockpot full of delicious enchilada chicken into the fridge for the night and got it out this morning. I thought about adding a little more water, but decided against it because I didn't want it to get too soupy.

I should have added some water.

And it totally isn't my fault it got burned.

See, I put the crockpot on the counter, plugged it in, turned it on low and went to work. Shawn got home about an hour and a half before I did. Normally when he comes home and we're doing crockpot stuff, he'll turn off the crockpot, or at least turn it to the 'warm' setting when he comes home because it's been cooking for 8-9 hours at that time. This time he didn't do that. He even went into the kitchen, looked at the chicken, thought it looked good and then went and played on the computer for about an hour before he thought that maybe he ought to turn off the pot. When he went back into the kitchen, the top of the chicken was all black and crusty. Sigh. Thankfully it didn't taste bad and we were able to avoid the largest blackened parts.

It was MUCH better than the last time we tried this recipe (I think the key is to use a whole chicken), but it still wasn't very spicy. Next time, we'll probably leave the habanero seeds in.