How to make a slow cooker roast chicken

We love a Sunday roast dinner, but while the weather has been warmer we’ve been making this slow cooker roast chicken instead of having our oven on.

Most weeks we will have a roast dinner of some sort on our meal plan. It’s a meal that I know the children will eat and my other half enjoys it too. Our kitchen gets very hot in the summer though and having the oven on for half the day just doesn’t work! So I started utilising our slow cooker a bit more to cook our chicken.

We’re also really lucky that we were gifted a microwave combi oven to us as a joint birthday present. So our main oven doesn’t need to be put on at all. Roast potatoes and roast veg can be cooked in the microwave oven instead of the main oven.

What you’ll need

A slow cooker
A whole chicken (just make sure it fits in your slow cooker first)
Any chosen herbs and spices
(Optional) A handful of chopped veg such as carrots or onions to line the base of the slow cooker to make soup/gravy.

First of all if you’re using the chopped veggies pop them in the bottom of the slow cooker. I’ve found that this step isn’t essential however if you want to make soup/ homemade gravy go for it!
If you’re not using the veggies to line the bottom then just place your chicken straight into your slow cooker. I’ve done this recipe both ways and it worked great either way.
Sprinkle your chosen herbs and spices over your chicken together with some salt and pepper and give it a nice rub.
Turn the slow cooker on to high for 4 hours or low for 6 hours. I tend to put ours on high for 4 hours and it comes out lovely and juicy. Although if you’re out most of the day low for 6 hours would also work.

As you can see we have a fairly decent sized slow cooker which fits the whole chicken with no problems, here it is all seasoned and ready to cook!

Recently I’ve been saving even more time (and money) on our roast dinners by picking up frozen roast potatoes for free using the Shopmium app! If you’ve never heard of Shopmium then it’s basically a cashback app with lots of grocery freebies and offers. You can read more information about the app here – What is Shopmium: Can it really save you money?