Oh my Crock Pot... One of the appliances I have been anxiously waiting to use! And since the weather today was still gloomy, cloudy, drizzly, and gray, the idea of having the delicious smells of home-cooking wafting about all day was just too good to pass up! The Crock Pot itself came with an instruction manual/cookbook with lots of delicious options, and my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook has several delightful possibilities as well. But last week I stumbled across a Facebook page titled Crock Pot Girls and decided to give one of their recipes a try. (Check it out. But a word of caution: the page is pretty disorganized, so you'll spend some time hunting. If you find a good one, cut and paste it into a Word document right away or you may never find it again. And - the recipes aren't necessarily calorie conscious. I immediately eliminated all recipes containing what I call Cream of Crap soup.... liters of pop as flavoring... gobs of gravy... etc.... Use your own judgment.)
Recipe:
1 small bag of baby carrots
1 can chunked pineapple (we used 20 oz can)
1/2 large red onion cut in chunks
2 cloves garlic
4 chicken breasts or 6 thighs
1/2 cup teriyaki sauce
salt and pepper to taste
Layer vegetables/fruit/garlic first, then add the chicken on top. Drizzle teriyaki sauce over the chicken and add salt and pepper to taste. Cover and cook on low for 8 hours. We will be serving ours over white rice. (Diva note: I served mine with brown rice. White rice and I don't get along.)
Decent. But not to die for. On the plus side, the chicken was not dried out. The vegetables were fully cooked. The flavors blended well together with nothing being too weak or too strong. And my Crock Pot did exactly what it promised when it automatically turned to the 'warm' setting at the end of the cooking time. On the downside, one of my favorite parts of slow cooking is enjoying the scent all day as the food cooks. In this case, the smell of the red onion overpowered everything else. And I don't particularly like onion. The end product was a little on the watery side for my taste. Alex liked it and let it soak into his rice. I would have preferred more of the water to cook off. And the flavor, while not bad, was not what I would call memorable. I don't see myself craving this particular meal in the future. I might make it again as a decent, easy week night meal but certainly not for a special occasion, and I'll try lots of other recipes before coming back to this one.
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