Chicken, chicken, and more chicken

We love the smell of roast chicken.  Or really any meat roasting.  Or cooking.  Or grilling.  We aren't picky.  We love meat.  You couldn't pay me to be a vegetarian.  No way, no how.  And we also love our crock pot.  It's simple, easy, makes the whole house smell good, and makes tons of food.

So I set out to find a recipe that would cook a whole chicken.  Because well, it tastes good and it gives you tons of leftovers.  I scoured the interwebs until I found this beauty:

Whole Chicken Crock Pot Recipe from Food.com.  And let me tell you, it was amazing.

Ingredients:

• 1 chopped onion (the recipe called for 1 cup and it's optional, but we just chopped up an onion.  Not even sure if it was more or less than a cup, but it worked)
• 4 t salt
• 2 t paprika (I only had smoked, so that's what I used)
• 1 t cayenne pepper
• 1 t onion powder
• 1 t thyme
• 1 t white pepper (I didn't have any, so I just used black)
• 1/2 t garlic powder (I always add a little extra since we love garlic in this family)
• 1/2 t black pepper
• 1 large roasting chicken (with pop-up timer, if possible) - Now, ours wasn't very large and it didn't have a pop-up timer.  But that's ok.  You work with what you can.

Directions (not straight from the recipe - this is what we did):

• Chop onion and place in bottom of crock pot.
• Place all spices in a small bowl.
• Remove giblets and whatever else is gross inside the chicken.  Wash and dry chicken.
• Place chicken in crock pot.  Rub spices all over chicken.  Flip and rub more spices on chicken.  Flip back over.  We had some remaining spices so I put some inside the chicken.
• Insert meat thermometer into chicken, be sure to get a deep part.  Set temp for 175 (you can use what temp you want, but this gave the chicken some time to rest and continue cooking without overcooking).
• Set crock pot timer (if you want).
• Once chicken is done, remove from crock pot and enjoy!

We served with poultry gravy (thickened with the onions and juices from the crock pot), green beans, and parsley potatoes.  The leftovers were shredded and then used in Chicken Pot Pie.