Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Teriyaki-ish Chicken in the Slow Cooker




Since my kids said they are sick of beef and carrots I decided to try cooking chicken in the slow cooker. My friend Maggie gave me the basis for the recipe: put frozen chicken breasts in what I fondly now call the Crack Pot and dump a can of Swanson's chicken broth on them. Well I couldn't stop at that. I got the bright idea to put the only recipe for any kind of tasty thing in there: teriyaki sauce. Its the only thing my mother taught me to make and HEY I remember it 15 years later!! See Mom?? I WAS listening! You could have taught me more!! Ok enough angst.

So here is what my recipe ended up being for today's "Cooking for Chumps" lesson:

4 FROZEN chicken breasts
1/2 cup of brown sugar, give or take 1/4 cup
a bunch of olive oil (probably about 1/3 cup)
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 chopped thingies of garlic (the small thingies that make up the big thingy)
can of Swanson's Chicken Broth
1/2 tsp Ginger I didn't have Ginger, so I used the closest thing I could find: Szechwan Spice.
1 lemon, sliced into circles not wedges. Probably doesn't matter but it looks nice :)



First, you are going to want to take the chicken out of the foam package its in, but you will most likely find the damn things are frozen tight to it. I asked Maggie what to do and she said to give it a warm bath. So I held it under warm water and then pried it off the foam. Then I had to break them apart since they were also stuck to each other! You may want to wear safety goggles for this hahaha


Dump them into the broth inside the cooker. Next add all the other ingredients except the lemon. Well, honestly I don't know if it matters when you add the lemon, but I waited until 2 hours before it was done and it was quite tasty. Hell, throw caution to the wind if ya want!

Turn it on High and cook for about 4 hours. I started it around 12:30pm. If you start early in the morning I would assume you would put it on Low!



As I said I put the lemon slices in around 3ish. That is because my lemon juice expired in 2007 and I had to walk to the grocery store and buy a lemon!! You can tell I don't cook often can you?

I also baked a batch of brownies for posterity, and boiled 2 bags of 10 min white rice to put under the chicken. I still have a sinus issue right now so I can't smell anything, but everyone seemed to think it smelled delicious.



We sat down to eat and everyone gave it a thumbs up! The chicken was smooth like buttah and pulled apart easily with a fork. The sauce in the bottom of the pot was good enough that my husband made more rice just so he could use it on something! He often eats 2 dinners so I wasn't too shocked. Somehow the man is 6'3" and 140 lbs and eats like a hogger. I learned long ago that such a metabolism does not run off on me just because I married him.

No comments:

Post a Comment