Recipe ideas for 16 week old dual purpose birds

[Amina]

I have a 12 week old marans cockerel that is just mean... he bites me hard whenever he gets a chance. I am planning to bite him back, lol. I may wait til 16 weeks like people recommend, for a larger bird. But each time he attacks, it is more painful than the time before, so I may decide in the next week or two that I just can't deal with it anymore. Let's say he'll be a minimum of 13 weeks, maybe up to 16 weeks. I definitely won't want to deal with his aggression for longer than that.

What I don't know is how to prepare him. I have really no experience cooking with meat other than really processed stuff like frozen chicken nuggets from when I was growing up. So can anybody give me a recommendation? The more details, the better, starting with the freshly dead, plucked, and gutted bird. Thank you!

 

[Amina]

Oh, and he started crowing early, at 6 weeks. I'm not sure how much difference that makes as far as how tough he'll be and how to adjust cooking temp/time.

 

[snoggle]

We use our dual purpose birds to make things like chicken and noodles since there is minimal breast meat compared to Cornish Cross. We usually cook them all day in the crockpot so the meat is tender (though this guy will be young enough that you shouldn't have a huge issue with him being too tough).

Also, we aged ours in the fridge for a few days before we cooked or froze them.