It’s a cold, wet and windy Sunday and I’m not leaving the house. What better than to do a slow cooker recipe to make the lace smell great all day?
Unfortunately, I’m not having luck finding a recipe, so I turn here.
What I have:
[ul]
[li]Chicken breasts[/li][li]Cream of broccoli soup (also a can of mushroom and one of onion)[/li][li]Boxed instant rice (with brocolli)[/li][li]Yellow onion[/li][li]Head of garlic[/li][li]Dried chiles[/li][/ul]
I also have various spices on hand.
What I’m thinking is to dump all that in and see what I end up with. I will leave the seasoning pack that the rice came with out of it, or else I think it’ll be too salty.
Sound like a good plan, or will I end up with a cooker full of off-white vomit?
I do chicken in BBQ sauce, then “pull” it after it’s cooked a good while. If you add onions…so much the better. Ditto a little beer or cider or whatever…
Minus the rice, chiles (wife can’t eat spicy) and cream of broccoli soup, I made that last night. It’s one of our go to recipes for a quick, cheap, healthy, and tasty meal. If you’re concerned about salt, you may want to check the sodium content on your cream of broccoli soup before you add it, otherwise it sounds delicious.
Other things you can do:
keep the chicken, onion, garlic, chiles, and add barbeque sauce as GrumpyBunny suggested. Cook the chicken breasts until they fall apart. Shredded BBQ chicken!
same as above, but add taco seasoning instead of BBQ sauce for shredded chicken tacos. I think I’d rather eat these than ground beef tacos, it’s much healthier and very very tasty.
Cook the rice separately if you decide to use it. Putting it in the crock will result in a rather gluey ugly mess :eek:
I always have breasts or thighs hanging around in the freezer. I like making pulled chicken with store-bought BBQ sauce with Montreal chicken seasoning and a splash of root beer. If I’m feeling ambitious I’ll make the BBQ from scratch.
Apologies for the hijack, but how do you make your BBQ sauce from scratch? I’ve always wanted to do that (although store bought Sweet Baby Rays is pretty damn tasty IMHO).
The meal is quite good. Those dried chiles really give a nice heat!
However, I made a blunder; I put all the dry rice in first and built on top of it. What happened was that the rice set like a layer of cement, not mixing at all with the other ingredients. I mixed it in by hand after as best as I could, but still have a hard layer in the pot that I’ll have to toss out. Cleaning that pot will not be fun! Can I borrow a jack hammer?
I use this recipe as a base recipe. I don’t always have hard liquor around, so I’ll swap it out for root beer or an ale. I made a delicious one in the dead of winter once using a bottle of Sam Adams’s version of chocolate stout. And, of course, the amount of heat you include is purely up to you
The most important piece of advice on slow cooker chicken I can give you is that every recipe ever written for slow cooking chicken gives too long a time for cooking it. You only need 2-3 hours on low to cook chicken pieces and have them stay juicy and tender and not falling apart. If you want to shred the chicken, go 3-4 hours. If you go longer than that your chicken will start to dry out and become stringy. The 6-8 hours on low almost every recipe calls for is ruining your chicken.
Sure, but breasts, especially, get to a stage where they shred but are stringy and dry. Not everyone seems to care or notice, but it is there. When I want to shred chicken, I always use thigh for this reason–it gets shreddy without feeling dry and stringy. YMMV, of course.
A vote for SBR’s; I always have an unopened bottle in the pantry. I’m a lazy bint.
I noticed the same thing and make my shredded chicken with thighs for that reason. Buy them on sale, parcel them out into servings, take what you need from the freezer when you need them. And I also found that 3-4 hours is plenty for cooking. I shred after about 3.
A departure from the ingredients in the OP, but I’ll mention anyway: I just made chicken stew for the first time and it was good enough to win first place in a contest at work and get lots of requests for the recipe (which I made up as I went along).
I slow cooked boneless skinless chicken thighs for about 6 hours in (storebought) Greek dressing, granulated garlic, and a sliced yellow onion. When it was done I shredded it with a fork.
I grilled some onions and garlic in an electric skillet, then put in some chicken broth and the juice from the slow cooker and brought it to a boil. I threw in some baby spinach and then the still hot chicken meat and stirred, then poured (Costco’s) pesto over the lot and stirred again. I served it over brown rice.
It.
Was.
Damned.
Good.
If I do say so myself (and, it seems, I do.)
OP, your list of food is one of my favorite cold-weather dishes.
My advice: start with a skillet and brown the chicken really good. If you think the skin might be burned but don’t smell any charcoal, that’s perfect. The flavors you develop by doing this will really up the quality of the final dish.
Now you have a skillet glazed with the drippings of the chicken. Get some onions and mushrooms started until they get just a little brown on them. Pour in a liquid of your choice: white wine or cooking sherry are both good. Chicken stock is also good. Water would still be fine. Once you’ve got the burned bits off the pan, mix in your mushroom soup.
Season to taste. Mushroom soup from a can is already pretty salty, so you probably just need pepper, but a little sage and garlic are nice.
At this point, you can transfer it all to a crockpot if you like. For myself, I have a cast iron skilled with a lid, and so I put the whole thing in the oven at like 250 F. This way, it’s a one-dish meal for me. In the oven, it needs about an hour or a little more.
When it comes to the rice, I agree that cooking it separately will come out best, especially if you’re using a crockpot. In my one-pan method, it can actually work OK to add the rice to my skillet as well, but I think the chicken comes out more tender and more moist if I do the rice separately.
Serve the chicken over the rice. Add a salad or something green. Dinner’s done!
Want Italian? My family’s chicken cacciatore recipe is essentially the same thing. Substitute tomato/spaghetti sauce for mushroom soup and substitute polenta for the rice. Mmmm.
[hijack]Mr. singular is trying Atkins again - anybody got some good ideas for Atkins Slow Cooker recipes? These all sound great, but the rice is a deal-breaker, & I really got a hankering for something crockpotted in this weather.[end hijack, with apologies to OP]
Whole 4-5 lb chicken, rubbed with anything you have that goes well with chicken. Add to crockpot. Dump in a can of small black olives (drained), small jar of pimento stuffed green olives (drained), small sliced onion, garlic, 2-3 slices of prosciutto cut into strips, can of chicken broth.
Chicken will fall apart when done. Makes a good gravy, serve over rice (or not, if it’s a dealbreaker).
