Chicken check-up

Since Huge Feathery-Welfareman's campaign against intensive farming of chickens, how have your shopping and cooking habits changed?

'You talkin' to me?' Photo: RSPCA

Over at a blog called Merrier World the ethical chicken debate is off and running again. Actually, judging by the comments it's less of a debate, more of a love-in for those who have seen the light and given broiler chooks the chop from their shopping lists.

The author has been calling for bloggers to post their favourite chicken recipes, including where they got the bird, or parts thereof - with a best-of published later today.

In our house we've converted to RSPCA Freedom Food chickens, the kind I have blogged about before, which I felt were slightly overlooked in the Huge Feathery-Welfareman TV drive. But what have you done? Gone the full free-range? Struck the happy Freedom Food medium, like us? Or did Hugh's rantings have the opposite effect - maybe, in this time of rising prices, you've switched to an all-chicken diet after realising just how incredibly cheaply you can buy the stuff if you don't care about the bird's quality of life. But there are better ways of making your money stretch - just by using the whole bird.

At our place, we buy one of the RSPCA birds a week, roughly, and baste it with melted butter, then stick it in the oven on full blast, 225C, for about an hour. Then we carve it up eat it with lentils and/or roast veg, plus some briefly boiled broccoli with salt, pepper and a drizzle of lemon juice (hint: boil your broc until it goes a brighter green, then another minute at most, and it's done to perfection).

Once they're cooked, the flesh of these Freedom Foods birds seems to have a more open grain - much more texture to it. Non-welfare chicken now seems slimy of skin and flesh to me.

The next step is to rip off the big bits of meat for the next day's lunch - maybe toting it to work with cold whatever-other-leftovers like the potatoes and broc.

A day or so later, I attack the carcass to remove every last accessible bit of meat. The best thing for this, I've found, is an infant's dinner fork, the kind with a looped handle that you can hook your finger through. Holding this in a sort of trigger-grip, you'll soon get the drift and learn to tell the edible meat from that flappy, rubbery connective tissue sort of stuff that stops hens falling apart as they poke around the pen. It's quite rewarding at the end to find you've stripped a pile of edible flesh from a bedraggled skeleton that was otherwise bound for the wheelie bin.

Next step, the bones - meaning the skeleton, plus the ones you've kept from last night's chewing and your lunchbox - go into the slow cooker with a chopped-up onion and carrot, and whatever neglected herbs are lying around, like some parsley, a bay leaf, and maybe that limp stick of celery from the bottom of the crisper (chopped up, leaves and all). Plus salt and pepper. Don't go overboard with different ingredients. Cover it all with water.

The slow cooker gets switched on to low, walked away from and forgotten about for a good while. People fuss over stock being cloudy or clear but I don't care. Life's too short. If the stock once strained turns out really tasty it gets made straight into chicken soup, with the pile of meat scraps thrown in along with some broken spaghetti or other pasta and a fresh chopped carrot. If the stock isn't that flavoursome it goes into recycled Chinese food containers in the freezer for a risotto or something.

Another measure I am trying to implement is buying whole chickens and jointing them, instead of buying breasts, thighs and the like separately. Jointing a chicken is surprisingly easy and the joints are meaty and succulent, once you get over the idea that a chicken breast must be whole with no bone.

And what about our deconstituted bits of bone and veg from the slow cooker? I would like to say that we find some sort of sustainable use for it, or perform a ceremony to help our little friend into poutry heaven, but it goes straight into the bin. I think we've done our bit to ensure that chicken's better-than-average life didn't go to waste. Are we missing anything?