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Posts Tagged ‘poultry’

Chicken is justifiably one of the best loved meats in the world.
It is virtually fat free, is protein rich, highly versatile and plays a major part in a lot of diet recipes. If you can buy an organic chicken, that will be better still, as it will be less likely to be contaminated with additives and hormones. It Is also a good policy for animal welfare, as most of the mass produced chickens are kept in conditions that are quite scandalous.

If you are not the dieting type, don’t worry, there is more to chicken than low carbohydrate recipes. Even so, most chicken recipes will be, broadly speaking, healthier than a similar recipe prepared using other meats.

Here is an example recipe that’ll please friends and family alike.

It requires:

One organic chicken (approx. 3.5 lb)
Two cupful of cyder
Six Fresh Apples (pared and quartered)
salt (as needed)
pepper (as needed)
One teaspoon cornstarch
1/2 cupful of whipping cream
1 tablespoonful of freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/3 cupful of butter
Two Tbs of oil (olive)
A quarter teaspoonful cinnamon (if you like – its optional)
Four green onions, (chopped well)
2 dried cloves
1/4 tsp. ginger
One sprig of parsley, (finely chopped, for use as a garnish)
Half teaspoonful dried thyme
2 tsp. of white sugar

Technique:

Wash the Organic Chicken and dry it well.
Combine some salt and pepper amd smooth it into the chicken (both inside and out)
Drizzle the lemon juice over the pieces of apple.

Take a large frying pan or skillet and melt half the butter then add the oil.
Put half of the apple pieces into the pan and fry lightly for five min. (until they have browned a little)
Mix in the ground ginger and stir well, heating it a short while longer to allow the ginger to develop it’s flavours.
Stuff the chicken with the apple mixture and close the chicken cavity by tying or by ‘pinning’ it with a metal or wooden skewer.

Add the rest of the butter to the pan and heat until it melts and then place the chicken in the pan and gently brown it, making sure it browns equally all over.
Place the bird in a big oven ready casserole dish with a tight fitting lid.
Take the rest of the apple, the spring onions, cinnamon, thyme, cloves and sugar and put them in the skillet.

Cook for two to three minutes and pour in the apple cyder and increase the heat to start the mixture boiling.

When the cyder is boiling, pour it over the bird and cover the pot with foil or waxed paper before placing the lid on the pot.

Put in the oven and cook for approx 3/4 hour at 200 Celsius

When the chicken is ready, put the chicken onto a heated platter whilst you prepare the cider gravy.

Skim the fat from the contents of the casserole pot and then boil the juices down until there is only one cupful left.

Pour in the whipping cream and cornstarch, stirring until it is thick and creamy.
Season to taste, and pour the sauce over the organic chicken

Sprinkle the parsley garnish over and serve.

To make the meal into a healthy and well balanced meal, you could serve the chicken with cauliflower or grilled mushrooms and carrots.

If you enjoy this dish, you can find a good selection of chicken recipes by spending a little time reading through any of the collections of free recipes available online, or by visiting your local library.

Recently, the dangers of Salmonella, in particular from consuming chicken, have been discussed so often on TV most people would have thought that incidences of infection to have reduced to almost zero. Sadly this is not what has happened. For people who eat chicken regularly, the dangers of getting sick or worse are far higher than they should be, and thousands of people are infected every year.

Knowing exactly what Salmonella is will help chicken consumers eliminate the dangers and avoid dangerous illensss.

Salmonella Explained
Put simply, it is a type of food poisoning which is caused by a nasty bacterium that exists in human beings, birds and other animals.
If you are infected with salmonella, you may suffer from fever, diarrhea, being physically sick (ie vomiting) and intense stomach cramp. Symptoms may begin within a few hours after eating the infected poultry and may last along as three days. Most sufferers recover after a few days rest, but in some cases, it can be a lot worse, requiring hospitalisation and in a few cases, can lead to death.

Help! How Can I Avoid This?

The advice given to cooks is :

* Wash your hands AND the chicken before before you start.
Salmonella can exist on your hands and also on the hands of anyone else how has touched the chicken. Washing effectively lowers the risks.

* Keep uncooked chicken away from anything on the kitchen counter.
When preparing a chicken meal, cross contamination is a major hazard. To reduce the risk, do not use the same cutting utensils for uncooked chicken as is used for cutting vegetables. Also, use one cutting board for the chicken and another fo the vegetables.

If you follow these precautions, cooking with chicken is perfectly safe and has benefits fro your general health,

Assuming you are now feeling a little more upbeat about buying and cooking chicken, here are a few other things to consider to make your chicken meals more healthy and tasty.

Nowadays there are many benefits to buying ‘free-range’ chickens or even totally organic chickens. Even the high street grocery stores are beginning to sell ‘organic’ or ‘free-range’ chicken, so gettiing hold of it is easier than ever. This is a good thing because many of us are unhappy that the larger chicken farms are simply trying to make more money and not looking out for the health and wellbeing of their poultry, or the end consumers. The name, ‘free-range’ is usually more familiar to people seeking to have a healthier eating lifestyle – it needs the chickens to have access to the open air and be allowed to walk around and eat naturally instead of being confined in a small pen, or crammed into a barn with thousands of others. Free range chickens live a more pleasant and less stressful life, and this results in a taster meat, and a cleaner conscience for the consumer.

If you want to add more chicken to your diet, you can find a wide variety of chicken recipes by checking out one of the recipe collections on the World Wide Web or by making use of the local library. Chicken recipes are almost always healthy recipes, if you follow the safe cooking tips detailed here.

Organic chickens, which may also be ‘free range’, have the extra restriction that they are not subjected to antibiotics, hormones, herbicides or pesticides. Many people think that both Free-range and organice chickens taste better and are juicier.

Did you know that organic chicken breasts only have 10 fat calories, 110 thigh calories and a whole chicken only has 130 calories?
If you are on a diet, that has to be good news, right? Chicken is features strongly in many low fat recipes.

If you are trying to build muscle and are concerned about protein, free-range chicken breasts have 22 grams, thighs have 19 grams and the whole chicken has 21 grams – all of that from a meat that is really tasty!