Super-Simple Crockpot Asian Chicken

This is stupid simple.

I LOVE it.

An easy-to-put-together sauce/marinade that can be frozen with or without the accompanying chicken parts or put together night before or morning of Dinner Day.  And it makes the house smell delicious and tastes yum.

I serve with rice (prepped ahead in a rice cooker on a delay timer) with steamed broccoli.  Super fast, super easy.

The OR calls for chicken thighs, which I like especially in the crockpot. Use whatever you like (I get this since I'm still married to the Chicken Princess who usually prefers chicken breast over dark meat), but whatever cut you pick...bone-in, thigh, breast, whatever...I would remove the skin or buy skinless.  There's no browning in this recipe, which is usually a bummer in a crockpot recipe anyway, and chicken skin will just be gross and flabby without that (troublesome) step.

Adapted from Blue Hill Slow Cooker & Family Recipes.

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Creole Risotto and How Your Christmas Lights Help You Prep Ahead

Finished dish with chicken and peas

I have a new cookbook (my Mother's Day gift to myself)!  It's a vintage cookbook called Scientific Cooking with Scientific Methods by Sarah E. Woodworth Craig, published in 1911 by Ellis Publishing Co (Battle Creek, MI).

It's chock-full of adverts for Vonnegut Hardware in Indianapolis (yes, *that* Vonnegut, though Vonnegut grandpère rather than Vonnegut grand-fils) and "scientific" culinary gems like, "Brain workers want to take easily digested foods, such as eggs, fish, etc. The laborer needs quantity, and can eat of corned beef, cabbage, corn bread and brown bread, and not overtax his digestion..."

As always, I wonder what of our current "known scientific truths" will seem quaint and outmoded in a few decades.

Outmoded though their musings on digestion are, I LOVE recipes from the pre-processed foods era.  In this instance, I'm combining one of the recipes with a previous Mother's Day gift (my rice cooker) and streamlining the recipe.

Rice cooker in foreground,
Christmas lights timer in background

I've been really into using my rice cooker lately as a prep-ahead tool in combination with...wait for it...my Christmas light timer.  Most rice recipes (the vegetarian ones) can sit out at room temp for a few hours before cooking without ill effects, but really can't sit around on "warm" all day without getting burned.  Enter the timer...  Rice cookers will generally cook white rice in 15-20 minutes, plus a few minutes cool-down time or brown rice in about 45 minutes with the same cool-down period.  Count backwards from your preferred meal time, and set your timer to start at the appropriate time.  Don't forget to set the rice cooker itself to "cook" even though it won't be kicking on for awhile.

Now the recipe...the original recipe calls for making a sauce of onions, pepper, mushrooms, sherry and tomatoes separate from the rice.  I sauteed the veg, added a splash of wine and added all this to the rice cooking liquid.  I used all mushrooms rather than a mixture of onion/pepper/mushroom because that's what I had on hand.  Use more veggies, less veggies, whatever works for you.

Also, be sure to use all the liquid called for even if it doesn't seem to jive with the rice cooker's notion of appropriate rice-to-liquid ratio...the volume of the sauteed veggies throws things off.

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Philly Cheese Steak Stuffed Peppers

Total Pin Win!  The hubbie loved it, the kids liked it, it was awfully darn easy to make.  I saw this on Pinterest and here's how I did it...

If you want a "fuller" stuffed pepper, double the amount of corned beef, mushrooms or both.

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Crockpot Green Pepper Pork

I'm working through the stash of garden veggies I froze this fall instead of canning or dehydrating.  Right now, it's bell peppers.  The frozen ones work well in this dish because they're meant to stew very soft anyway (and you lose the crunch when you freeze peppers).  You can of course make this with fresh peppers.

I served this dish over rice, but you can also put it in tortillas as a wrap or serve it with biscuits or cornbread.

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San Francisco Pork Chops

Original recipe here.

These are just so good!  The finished reduction is a mite salty thanks to the soy sauce, so I strongly recommend using low-sodium soy sauce and maybe even going halfsies on the soy with some no-salt broth.

These are completely prep-ahead and freezer-friendly.  Just mix up all the sauce ingredients in a container to fridge or freeze, make sure you've got pork chops available and have cornstarch in your pantry. 

The sauce reduces as the pork chops cook on the stovetop, giving a thick, glossy, flavorful glaze that is just out of sight.


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Chinese BBQ Pork

Oh.My.Goodness.Delicious.

My kids are sick and therefore on a hunger strike against snot, but they demolished this pork (while leaving everything else on their plates untouched).  You can make this in advance to serve cold or reheat or just plan to use it in something else (recipe for THAT to come!)

This is adapted from the Frugal Gourmet (who else?) and his recommended cooking set-up is to put the marinated meat directly on your oven racks with a water-filled drip tray underneath.  My oven racks aren't clean enough for that ::blush:: and really, who wants to scrub honey-marinated pork bits off your whole flapping oven rack?  I devised a good work-around in using a cooling rack positioned over a 13x9 pan filled with water placed on a baking tray for transportability.

If you don't have red miso or black bean sauce on hand, you can sub in Marmite or just leave this out.

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Stay-in Take-out: Pork Lo Mein

This is an America's Test Kitchen recipe originally, which means it's absolutely delicious but persnickety and step-heavy.  If you want to try it Chris Kimball's way, you can prep it ahead for same day or next day cooking with no problem...assemble the marinade for the meat and get that started, make the sauce, chop the veggies and grate/mix the ginger-garlic and set all that aside in the fridge.  But you can't freeze it ahead as a kit well, and the final cooking process comes to way more than 3 or 4 steps which my mental processing limit at 6pm.

 

So I keep the best parts of this recipe (the sauce, the cut of pork and the basic method of cooking) and reconfigure all the other parts to achieve simplicity and freezability.  If I do say so myself.  For vegetables, you'll need about 8-9 cups of veg...it seems like a lot, but it cooks down.  I park some frozen veggies in the freezer kit and plan to make up the remainder with fresh vegetables purchased the week I'll make this dinner or canned stirfry favorites like water chestnuts or bamboo shoots.  Use what you like in any combination. 

 

For the "lo mein", I've used udon, soba and whole wheat linguine, all with perfectly good results.  Just make sure to read the package directions since each type requires a different cooking time.

 

The sauce ingredients are perhaps a bit outside of the usual pantry staples, but are worth finding if only to duplicate this recipe many times over.  Oyster sauce is in the Asian foods section of even my podunk grocery stores, and it's like a steak sauce but much less vinegar-y.  Hoisin is an Asian-style barbecue sauce, and 5 spice powder is a mix of pepper, fennel, cloves, cinnamon and anise (at least my jar is).

 

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Stay In Take Out: Fried Fish

This is a lighter version of take-out batter-fried fish, but just as crispy.  Adapted from the Frugal Gourmet's Three Ancient Cuisines (again!)...it was actually a "freebie" meal that I prepared in order to have leftover fried cod (sounds weird, I know).  It turns out the fried cod itself was better than the stirfry the leftovers were destined for!  Depending on which carry-out joint you want to mimic, you can serve this plain with horseradishy-mayo dip or on a bun.

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Sesame Almond Chicken Wings

Almond Sesame Wings with sauteed zucchini
and Sichuan Peppercorn Dry Drip

This is the wing recipe I mentioned a few posts ago regarding grinding almonds for pie crust.  I saved a few tbsp for this very recipe.  You don't have to make pie crust to make these wings though ;)

The original recipe is from the Frugal Gourmet's Three Ancient Cuisines, but I gotta say that the Frug was awfully stingy on his dredging mixture.  I've doubled the marinade, the wet dredge and the dry dredge for the same number of wings.  It was scrumptious btw.  The kids didn't want any, but they had Other Issues tonight and I think I could have served them ice cream covered cheese sticks with a side of cookies, muffins and bananas and they still wouldn't have touched it.  Whatevs, more for the grownups.

Rice flour is probably not a pantry staple at your household.  I have some b/c I had a fit of DIY-osity awhile back and thought I would be making my own baby powder.  I made some, it's great, but I don't need so much as to use up an entire 2 lbs. of rice flour.  Rice flour also makes meltingly tender shortbread and is a useful gluten-free wheat flour replacer.  If you need ideas for using up 2 lbs of rice flour.  Or you can use enough all-purpose flour and cornstarch to add up to the required amount of dredging material and skip the rice flour (conversely, if you want gluten free, you can skip the AP flour and use rice flour and cornstarch...also be sure to skip the soy sauce, if you do GF).

Last thought...if you fry these in a deep-fryer, you'll probably have a lot of sesame seeds loose in the oil afterwards.  You might want to consider frying in an electric skillet or making this the last use of the oil in the deep-fryer if you want to maintain pristine frying oil.  I screw up so you don't have to.

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Crockpot Onion Soup

It's not really *soup* season but it is sweet onion season, so now's the time.  The crockpot is a beautiful thing for this recipe...you use it to caramelize the onions overnight and then cook the soup.  I have seen recipes that call for one process or the other (or ofc for doing it all on the stovetop), but not both and quite frankly I think doing both is a brilliant proposal.  Especially when I do not want to babysit a pot of soup on the stove or even turn on my stove right now. 

Like any soup, leftovers reheat very nicely so you can make this totally in advance if you wanted.  Though since it goes in the crockpot, all you need for convenient cooking is to premeasure the second-stage ingredients and have them ready to dump in after the onions are brown.

I really like a little heat in this recipe.  The sweetness of the onions mellows the chipotle, and the chipotle keeps the onions from being sickly-sweet.  But if you don't do heat, don't add the chipotle.  One can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce will go a LONG way.  I go ahead and chop up the whole thing, and freeze the leftover smoosh in ice cube trays or pressed thinly in a ziptop bag for future recipes. 

A classic element of French Onion Soup is that melty, cheesy mess on top.  I loathe that part.  It's a pain to execute and a pain to eat.  I prefer to have grilled cheese alongside an unadorned bowl of soup.  I figure a grilled cheese sandwich hits all the same flavor and texture notes as a broiled cheesy baguette slice.  If you are *really* pressed for time on Dinner Day, you can butter the bread and stack the sandwiches the night before when you start the onions and just put the prepped sandwiches in a panini press or on a griddle, saving you a few minutes' prepwork and cleanup.

You do want to use the biggest crockpot you have, a 6 quarter preferably.  A 4 quarter will be very full, but if you reduce the amounts of the ingredients to 75%, you should be ok.  For one of those cute little 2 quart crockpots, you could reduce the ingredients by half and have a nice little dinner for 2.

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Lewd Crockpot Beef

I went shopping today without a real meal plan...not unprecedented, but definitely not common.  I picked up a few cuts of meat that were on manager's special (sounds better than "bargain bin beef", doesn't it? LOL) and figured I'd figure out what to do with them when I got home. 

So Surprise Dinner #1: Crockpot Chinese Looed Beef.  Looed is pronounced "lewd", much to my husband's giggly delight.  Looing is, according to the Frugal Gourmet, a Chinese method of cooking wherein meat is slowly simmered in a flavorful cooking liquid which can be reused for subsequent looing sessions.  Sounds like a perfect recipe for the crockpot to me. 

Star anise is a vital ingredient in this sauce. It is really an unmatched flavoring agent in Chinese cooking. It isn't quite the same as aniseed or fennel seed, though they are similar in flavor. If you can't find whole star anise, use 1 tsp of ground anise or 1 tsp of five spice powder.

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Chinese Maple Chicken & Grilled Marinated Bok Choy

No fake maple syrup please.  Did you know that artificial maple flavor is derived from fenugreek seeds which are a dietary supplement commonly used by nursing mothers to boost milk supply?  Makes you wonder why Mrs. Butterworth is so curvy.  I'd personally substitute molasses for maple syrup here if no real maple syrup is to be had.

This marinade lends itself well to chicken in a variety of formats.  I had planned to spatchcock mine and freeze it in the marinade, but life throws curveballs and I wound up roasting the whole bird with only a brief marinating period.  I think it would be especially scrummy on grilled chicken parts, too. 

And the maple syrup concoction did double duty as a browning agent/dressing for grilled bok choy.  Love grilled lettuces! 

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Asian poached fish with peppers



Prep-ahead mise-en-place



This is such a great non-recipe.  It works with whatever you've got on hand in the way of fish, aromatics, poaching liquids and vegetables.  I do always use bell peppers, but you could use anything that will steam fairly quickly...bok choy, thin sliced carrots, frozen broccoli or peas.  And it's crazy-fast to make, even if you don't prep ahead.

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