It recently occurred to me that I could mix a couple of cans of canned chicken and a jar of Tikka Masala sauce to produce some sort of chicken curry dish. I’m thinking of doing this in a slow cooker to get more flavor into the chicken, but since the chicken’s already cooked, I’m worried about simmering for more than a couple of hours. Or is there no danger of the chicken drying out so long as it’s swimming in curry sauce?
What about throwing an (opened) bag of boil-in-bag rice in for the last half hour? Will it absorb liquid from the sauce, or does rice not work like pasta?
(For those noting the rather obvious omissions from this recipe: no veggies for me, please).
Given that you’re doing it in a slow cooker, why not use real chicken? Skinless, boneless chicken thighs are readily available and not overly expensive, just throw a few of those in.
I’d do the rice separately. Not that I think it would be impossible to do in the slow cooker, but I’m guessing you’d have to experiment with the amount of liquid and time it takes to cook.
I know when I lived on a boat we used canned chicken. Didn’t have refrigeration for fresh ingredients, so if we bought fresh we had to cook it the same day. Wasn’t bad, used it in one pot meals w/canned soup and some sort of starch like rice or noodles.
As far as a slow cooker goes the meat would certainly fall apart if cooked for too long. But if you just cooked it for an hour or 1 1/2 hours max it should be all right. Rice separate for sure. They have cooked rice in packages now that are not refrigerated that I totally would have on my boat if I still had one.
No veggies for me, either! I’d love to hear how this turns out, Mr Downtown. If you give it a try, please share your rice success or failure, and how the jarred sauce holds up in the slow cooker.
It was delicious. A classic three-Kleenex Indian meal, and leftovers for two more. I went with Trader Joe’s microwave rice and a piece of naan I had in the freezer. The chicken fell apart during the cooking, but that was perfectly fine.
I certainly could use fresh or frozen chicken, I suppose, but that raises the question of whether it would cook sufficiently in the slow cooker or would have to first be browned in a skillet. Second, it would be a little more expensive (canned chicken from Aldi is cheap). Third, I’d have to divide the package, chop it into chunks, and do other messy things. And most important, it would require closely coördinating the day I buy the chicken with the day I cook the meal. This only required opening and dumping two cans of chicken and a jar of sauce into the cooker and returning three hours later.
I shall certainly try this again, depending on what Indian sauces I can find around town. The Tikka Masala came from Big Lots, so is unlikely to be seen again.
I made a crock pot of Indian-esque chicken just last week. 1.5 lbs of boneless, skinless thighs, a 10 oz package of chopped spinach, a can of chicken stock, a can of mushrooms and a big load of Pataks Ginger and Cinnamon curry paste. Put it on high and come back in a few hours. Delicious.