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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Crockpot Braised Chicken & Red Cabbage

It's been awhile since I've posted anything here, not because I haven't been cooking but because life has been busy, and I've mostly been retreading familiar recipes...the ones I've posted here!  I've said before that the main reason I started this blog was for my own personal reference, and I've gotten some good mileage on that front in the last few whiles.

The kidlets get bigger and bigger, and they're doing more and more sports/homework/etc. during what used to be my cooking/prep time.  I've been keeping up by using the crockpot, and I'm needing to expand our repertoire.

This is adapted from Blueberry Hill Slow Cooker & Family Recipes.  I prepped it ahead and kept it in the fridge about 3 days before I made it for dinner.  Freezing is always an option, though.  I would definitely saute the veg before freezing it, but not the chicken.  If you don't have a few minutes to brown the chicken before putting it in the crockpot, I think you'll be fine just putting it in unbrowned.  For ease of packaging, freeze extra wine in an ice cube tray and use the frozen cubes for a freezer kit.

If you don't know what else to try juniper berries in, try adding them to sauerbraten.  Or a gin martini.

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Crockpot Black Beans

I loves a good bean recipe.  I served this the first night as our main dish with salad and bread (cornbread would have been an excellent accompaniment, but alas was not meant to be that night).  I served the leftovers (and there will be a lot unless you're feeding a small army or a couple of teenage boys) as taco filling the next night.

Even though these beans cook all day in a crockpot, you still need to presoak them.  Depending on what kind of schedule you have, that might mean soaking overnight (to put in the crockpot in the morning), through a whole day (to prep in the evening for the next day's crockpotting) or doing the boil-two-minutes-then-cover-and-soak-one-hour thing.

Crockpots keep food very moist, so be sure not to add too much stock, otherwise you'll have bean soup instead of beans.  Add stock until just before the beans would be totally covered; you should still see little lumpy-bumps of beanage peeking through the surface of the liquid.

Crockpot Black Beans
Makes 8-10 servings

1 lb. black beans, soaked several hours or quick-soaked and drained
2 tbsp oil
2 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 mild pepper such as anaheim or poblano, chopped
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 tsp seasoning salt
1 bay leaf
1 14 oz can crushed tomatoes
2 tbsp lime juice
4-5 cups vegetable or chicken broth

Prepare beans.  Heat oil in a skillet and saute onions, garlic, peppers and seasonings 5-10 minutes until soft.  Stir in remaining ingredients, except for broth.  Fridge or freeze, if desired (as a scheduling note, you could do the sauteing the night before Crockpot Day and start soaking the beans at the same time; the next morning mix it all together in the crockpot).

On Crockpot Day, put the onion-bean-tomato mix in the crockpot (still frozen is OK).  Add stock to barely cover the beans.  Cook on low 8-10 hours.


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Beef Roast & Beef Manhattan

Beef Manhattan is one of those looked-down-upon dishes because you typically see it in cafeterias and hospitals.  Really, it shouldn't be overlooked.  It's a great way to repurpose leftover roasted beef.  The first day after we have roasted beef, there's an excited flurry of roast beef sandwiches for lunch, then...it sits.  Beef Manhattan revives and reinterests the dinner-time audience ;)

If you don't want to use Russian dressing (because, really, it is a bizarre form of salad dressing that's far better suited to marinades than dressing salad IMHO), use an equal amount of ketchup with liberal dashes of salt, pepper and garlic powder with a splash of red wine vinegar.  If you do use Russian dressing but wonder what else to do with it, I recommend this freeze-ahead chicken dish.

To make the gravy for Beef Manhattan, I used a red wine reduction to happy up the stock.  If you'd prefer to skip the wine, use 1 tbsp tomato paste and brown it very well (5-ish minutes over medium heat without oil) in the saucepan instead.

If you're planning well in advance, you can make the gravy without the cooking juices from the beef and freeze it.  When you're ready to serve the second-round Beef Manhattan, thaw the gravy, warm it to bubbling, add the reserved juices and chopped beef and simmer until it's a good consistency.

You can serve Beef Manhattan over bread (white or whole wheat) or over mashed potatoes.  If you're looking for a lower-carb version, serve over pureed cauliflower.

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Gumbo Z'herbes

I saw the original recipe in the May 2013 issue of Food & Wine magazine.  It's a meat 'n' greens stew, and takes advantage of all the tasty spring greens hitting the markets (or coming up in your garden) at this time of year.  As a stew, you can make it in advance very nicely...the first time I tried this recipe, I cooked it fully in the morning and put it in the crockpot to keep warm until we got home that night.  It also freezes beautifully.

Btw, "z'herbes" is shortening of "fines herbes"...a mix of fragrant, flavorful green herbs such as tarragon, rosemary, thyme, parsley, lavender and so on.  It's pronounced "zayrb", if you're a French linguistics nerd like me ;)

The OR calls for particular amounts of particular greens and particular amounts of particular cuts of pork...I think of it more as guidelines ;)  I LOVE that I can throw in that half a head of cabbage that's left after making cabbage 3 different ways for a regular side dish, the rest of the collard greens left over after making sausage-stuffed collards, the nubbin of romaine lettuce left over from 2 salads.  Use turnip greens, beet greens, mustard greens, chard, kale, spinach, collards, spring mix, romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce...about 3 lbs. of whatever is green in your fridge or garden.

And you can throw in handfuls of oddball greens like carrot tops (if you get carrots with the frondy greens still attached), second-year parsley (oddly, my parsley survived our winter and is coming back up and preparing to bolt as biennial plants do), watercress or arugula that you scavenge out of your early garden.

Clockwise from left: Ham hock, chopped hamsteak
with thyme, andouille

I'm also using up the last of our locally-raised hog.  When you buy a whole animal like that, you wind up with...well...weird bits.  Bacon ends.  Bony sirloin roasts.  Smoked hambones.  Tiny pork chops that are too little to serve by themselves.  I'm throwing all that stuff in this stew.  You can use fresh pork shoulder or loin, smoked pork, sausage links (andouille is traditional, and is the only thing I've bought special for this stew), ham hocks, hamsteak, chopped ham, neck bones...about 3 lbs. total.

When you chop up all those greens, it's a LOT.  You'll need an 8 quart or larger pot.  And then you only add 2 quarts of water to that pile.  It seems like too little.  It's not.  Trust me.  The greens cook down and give off their own liquid to make a flavorful broth that the stew is built on.  You do not want too much water here.  Here's how to tell if your tiny amount of water is boiling when you can't see it under a mess o' greens...put the pot lid on, turn the heat to high, and when there's condensation on the underside of the lid, you're good to go.

Lastly, the OR calls for file powder which I don't keep in my pantry.  File is a flavoring as well as thickening ingredient.  I add extra flour to compensate for the lack of file.  Use 2 tbsp flour instead of 4 tbsp and 1 1/2 tsp file powder if you want.  You can always add some beurre manie at the end if your stew seems too watery.

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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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Coca Cola BBQ Chicken Crockpot version

As promised, the results of my home experimentation.  I don't think I'll make this recipe any way but in the crockpot from now on!

This version of this recipe double-ups the goodness by 1) becoming crockpot-friendly and 2) reducing the amount of fat in the recipe. 


You'll need to buy skinless bone-in chicken parts, or more likely yank the skin off your cut-up chicken.  It's not hard.  Hold the chicken in one hand (my left, since I'm a rightie), and use a paper towel to get a better grip on the skin with your other hand (my right, since I'm a rightie).  Pull.  Don't be afraid.  Just do it.  Yank.  Yank some more.  It will come off.  Don't sweat getting every tiny bit of skin off. 



Skinned chicken, chicken skin and sauce

Now what to do with that skin?  You can fling it, or if you want to be extremely resourceful and frugal, you can a) render it like bacon for chicken fat, a.k.a. schmaltz or b) spread it flat on a rack placed over a baking sheet and bake it until crisp to make a poultry version of pork rinds.  Or you can chop it up, saute it quickly and feed it to your dogs.

If we're taking the skin off, why don't we just use boneless chicken and save ourselves the fuss of working around bones in the cooked dish?  Because i) the bones will fall right out after a day of crockpot cookery and really not present much of a problem and ii) the bone-in structure will help keep your crockpot from way-overcooking these bad boys.

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Hungarian Stuffed Peppers: Quick-style

Baked sausage and chard casserole

I love the Frugal Gourmet's Hungarian Stuffed Peppers, but when I was at the store today and saw red bells unexpectedly on sale, I couldn't summon enough wits to remember all the ingredients for that recipe.  And it takes a lot of steps which I just didn't feel like knocking out today.  So I'm borrowing the elements that I think make that recipe distinctive--notably the use of paprika and sauteed parsley--and sliding them into a "regular" stuffed pepper recipe.

Because I just bought ingredients willy-nilly today ::blush::, I wound up with a boatload of filling for 4 peppers.  Which worked out well because it yielded a second bonus dish!  You could also halve the filling recipe to just make 4 peppers, or use all the filling for 8 peppers.

The peppers are freezable and crockpot-able; the bonus casserole is freezable (possibly crockpot-able, too, but someone will have to experiment and report back to me on that one).  By the way, my kids LOVED this casserole, even the one who doesn't like veggies.



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Sauerbraten

A beef roast that's been marinated in spiced red wine, then braised in the crockpot with gravy thickened with gingersnaps...that so says "holiday season" to me!  My recipe is a mash-up of a recipe from a 1975 cookbook called The Crockery Pot Cookbook by Lou Seibert Pappas and the Frugal Gourmet's Immigrant Ancestors recipe.

Sauerbraten can be made with a variety of beef roast cuts...I used a rump roast, but eye round, chuck pot roast, bone-in, bone-out, it all works.  It does need to marinate for at least 3 days, if not longer, so making this up and freezing it works well.  The marinade recipe I use is about 2 parts wine to 1 part vinegar, and I'd be comfortable freezing it for up to 3 weeks before I'd start to worry about the acid level of the marinade making mush out of my roast.  You can also leave the beef and marinade in the fridge until you cook it, if you have the space.

A word on browning meat before putting it in the crockpot.  It's a pain.  It completely detracts from the no-fuss appeal of using the crockpot.  It's usually not *really* necessary.  In this recipe though, I think you need to brown at least the top side of the roast.  Reason being that when you take the roast out of its 3-day booze bath, it will be purple.  Purple.  Not purple-y.  Purple.  Like Violet in Willa Wonka.  Purple.  Browning, well, makes it brown instead of purple.  Now if you don't brown the roast, it's not like you'll end up with a roast that looks like a grape popsicle at the end of the day, but it won't be quite as roast-colored as usual either.

To slice a roast well, let it rest several minutes before touching it.  Look for the direction of the grain of the meat...if you see long ridges in the meat, that's the "grain".  Don't cut directly across the grain, or you'll wind up with shredded beef.  Don't cut with the grain or you'll have tough slices of beef.  Make slices at about a 45 degree angle to the grain for the right balance of tenderness and cohesion.

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Saffron Chili

Dratnabbit, I made this chili the other night and forgot to take any pictures!  It *looks* like regular ol' chili, so you're really not missing much in the visual aid department, but what really sets it apart is the flavor and aroma that the saffron brings and we don't have smell-o-blog technology any way.

This is an adaptation of another Frugal Gourmet recipe.  I halve the recipe b/c I'm only feeding a small army, not a huge one, and do a lot of the steps differently to keep from making every single pot I own dirty. 

The recipe calls for 2 spendy ingredients...shallots and saffron.  They really are worth it here.  If you don't want to splurge on both, substitute red onion for the shallots, but you must, must, must have saffron for this recipe to be anything but plain ol' chili.  A small pinch goes a long way and really does shine through.  Other ideas for using saffron include: Saffron cornbread, Scalloped Potatoes and Saffron Griddlecakes. 

For prep-ahead/make-ahead instructions...to prep ahead, chop the shallots/onion and garlic and combine.  Stir saffron into broth.  Measure out spices.  That's about all you need to do.  You can ofc make this entirely ahead to reheat (in a crockpot, perhaps) or freeze.  I served this chili same-day and froze the leftovers for another meal of chili stroganoff (2 cups chili melted with 8 oz. cream cheese and served with bread and veggies for dipping). 

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Garlic Artichoke Pasta

I <heart> artichokes.  They're supposedly cancer-fighting and they're exotic and they're amazing with butter.  That's the first thing that made me want to try this recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens Better Than Mom's Slow Cooker Recipes book.  The second thing was that this is a recipe that is made practically entirely from pantry goods without being one of those can-of-cream-of-death-soup type of recipes.  You can buy all the ingredients you need for this ahead and keep them on-hand as a pantry meal kit.  You can also prep the crockpot mixture ahead to fridge or freeze.

Until I had a toddler, we never had dairy beverages in the fridge routinely.  I had to buy milk or cream or half-and-half specifically for a recipe that called for it.  These days, I use whole milk for all recipes calling for cream or half-and-half because it is what we have in the fridge.  So use whatever you happen to  have here (or use canned evaporated milk, if you are like pre-toddler, dairy-drink-less me) if you throw this recipe together out of "ingredients on hand".  If you're planning to make a meal kit for this recipe, you can freeze an appropriate amount of milk or cream, rely on having some in the fridge on Dinner Day or buy canned evap milk for the "pantry kit". 

Comparatively, cream and half and half will be the highest in calories and fat, then evaporated milk and regular milk.  If you get non-fat evap milk, you'll get the best of both worlds...the lighter caloric/fat profile of milk with the rich mouthfeel of cream.

So a meal kit for this recipe will look like this: canned tomatoes, canned artichokes, box of pasta and can of evap milk (if using) labelled and stored in the pantry with garlic+dry herbs and milk/cream (if using) on hand or frozen in ziptop bags.  OR everything except milk mixed together and frozen with pasta/evap milk in the pantry.

The one gripe I have about this recipe is that it's a crockpot recipe that still requires significant cooking right before dinner.  The joy of the crockpot is that you don't have to cook at dinnertime, right?  Boiling pasta isn't hard, but getting the water up to a boil takes time...more time than I'm willing to spend to "finish" a crockpot meal. 

The solution is to cook the pasta almost fully in advance, toss it with a bit of oil or butter to keep it from sticking, fridge it and stir it into the crockpot at the end to warm up and finish cooking through.  Or you can boil the pasta at the last minute, whatever works with your schedule.  Just please don't rinse the pasta...rinsing washes away starch which will prevent the pasta from sticking to itself but then it also won't stick to the sauce.  Besides, the starch is where the flavor lives (yes, pasta does have a flavor of its own) so rinsing washes away flavor, too.

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Crockpot Grinders

Oh. My. Gawd. These are good.  All my favorite things...crockpot-friendly, prep-ahead and freezer-friendly and garlicky.

You can serve the grinders on toasted hoagie rolls and topped with cheese, sauteed peppers, onions and mushrooms.  Just layer everything up and broil a minute or two to melt the cheese.  Or for a lower carb serving idea, serve the sauce and sausage over cooked spaghetti squash, steamed cauliflower or braised cabbage.

This recipe makes either 1 really big batch, or 2 smaller batches.  Perfect for dinner tonight and 1 freezer kit, 2 freezer kits or dinner for a crowd.  There's a lot of sauce here, and leftover sauce can be frozen to repurpose as pizza sauce or pasta sauce.

Adapted from the Better Homes and Gardens Better Than Mom's Slow Cooker Recipes.


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Crockpot Sloppy Joes & Mustard Bread buns

Spending some time slow-cooking makes this sloppy joe filling remarkably tender and blends the flavors in a way that just can't happen in 20 minutes on the stovetop.  The real beauty of this recipe (adapted from BH&G's Slower Cooker Recipes) is that it adapts to whatever your cooking time frame is...if you've got a whole day free before you need to serve it, you can do it completely in advance and reheat from fridged or frozen...if you've got just a little time to prep and more to cook, just measure, assemble and freeze the ingredients to finish on Dinner Day...or if you're in between, you can cook the beef and onions and freeze it with the sauce to dump into the crockpot on Dinner Day.  Options, options, options!

This recipe makes A LOT of sloppy joe filling, so serve it for a crowd or serve half for dinner and freeze the remainder for another day.

I'm serving this tonight with Mustard Bread buns, a recipe adapted from one of James Beard's.  If you use a bread machine, add the ingredients in the order recommended by your instruction manual and use the dough setting.  The bread dough can itself be frozen if desired.  If you freeze shaped rolls, simply thaw them at room temp, let them rise until doubled in size (if you take them out of the freezer in the morning, they should be good by afternoon) and bake them off.

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Beef and berry stew

WHAT kind of stew??  (I can hear some readers asking already)

Beef stew.  With blackberries.  Calm down, it's delicious.  And easy with only 5 ingredients.  And seasonal.  And a lesson in our nation's cultural heritage.  According to the Frugal Gourmet (from whom the original recipe comes), this is a Sioux recipe that would have been made with bison meat charred briefly over an open fire with wild berries picked at the height of summer. 

This is a great recipe for me as my blackberry plants only produce a handful of berries at a time toward the end of the season, where most blackberry recipes call for several cups.  If you use frozen berries and plan to make freezer kits, one 12 oz. bag will make 2 batches of this stew so go ahead and get double the beef and broth and make one batch for dinner and one batch into a freezer kit.

Stew beef is a more convenient choice than a slab o' buffalo IMHO. And cooking it in a crockpot instead on the stovetop is a far more convenient choice.

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Beef Cabbage Casserole

I loves me some cabbage rolls, but the head of cabbage I had in the fridge wasn't really big enough to get decent-sized leaves off of for rolling.  Besides, I'd just spent the afternoon throwing together the next couple of weeks' worth of freezer meals and I was pooped.  So I decided to make "deconstructed" cabbage rolls instead.  A bonus of making this casserole instead of regular cabbage rolls is that you aren't left with that tiny ball of cabbage that you can't get any more decent-sized leaves from.  While it most certainly can be shredded and repurposed into a recipe for coleslaw or salad, some days that's just too much bother.  And it's as easy to make two of these casseroles as to make one.

This recipe can be cooked from a frozen state but it will take at least 2 hours in the oven.  If you want to do this, be sure to assemble the casseroles in metal pans (disposal or regular metal baking pans), NOT in ceramic or glass pans!!!  Ceramic and glass will be fine if you thaw the casserole first, though I'd still leave the dish on the counter for 30 minutes or so to avoid cold-glass-meets-hot-oven fireworks.  With *really* good planning, this can be a crockpot meal as well...just be sure to assemble and freeze the casserole in a pan that is smaller than your crockpot insert (a small cake pan works for mine) or put 1/2 the following recipe directly into the crockpot insert for next-day cooking.

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Savoy Cabbage Rolls

The first time my parents went out of town and left my teenaged brother and I home alone for the night, I seized freedom with both hands and...cooked cabbage rolls.  What a rebel I was ;)  I have ever since had a soft spot for all sorts of cabbage rolls, as I mark that recipe as the first time I ever *really* planned and cooked a meal.

The original recipe comes from the behemoth European cookbook "The Silver Spoon", though I have experimented wildly with storage and delayed-cookery options, rewrote the recipe to use less weird measurements and upped the vegetable ante.  SS assumes that you will have time to prepare the leaves, prepare the filling, roll the rolls and cook them all at once.  Bwahahahahahaha!  I made the rolls and froze them individually, then cooked mine from the frozen state on the stovetop.  Turned out really well.  I'd guess that the crockpot will work just as well, though thawing the rolls first would make fitting them into the pot (on the stovetop or in the crockpot) easier.  You can also bake them in the oven, but that will take longer and you really will need to thaw them first. 

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Further Adventures in Homemade Yogurtry

Attempt #2.  Interesting.  Recap of the basic recipe:

8 cups milk
1/2 cup yogurt with live cultures
Optional: unflavored gelatin or Jello (I used 2 3 oz. Jello packets this time)

Put the milk in the crockpot and heat on low for 2.5 hours.  Turn off and let stand 3 hours.  Whisk 1 cup of warm milk into yogurt along with gelatin if using.  Mix back into crockpot.  Let stand, covered and well-wrapped to retain heat, for at least 8 hours.  Fridge for a few hours if using gelatin.

Funky browned milk

First of all, I have discovered that a regular ol' crockpot is the way to go.  I tried using a fandangled pressure cooker-crockpot-steamer thingie that I really like, but not for this.  The cooking element gets too hot, and made a layer of custard crust at the bottom of the pot...a desirable result for some recipes, but not this one.  I screw up so you don't have to...just use a plain crockpot with a ceramic insert that can't be used for speed-cooking beans.

I also tried using more gelatin this time, in the form of fruit flavored Jello.  I'd love to say that I'm making homemade yogurt because it's healthier, blah, blah, but I'm tired of buying ridiculously expensive tiny cups of kiddie yogurt so I'm trying to duplicate it more cheaply.  Per ounce, two 3 oz. packets of Jello will not make my homemade yogurt contain any more sugar than commercial yogurt, so that's good enough for me.  Although adding the flavored jello to the whole batch does compromise the future use of your homemade yogurt as a starter for the next batch (I used 1/2 cup of the last batch instead of buying another container of plain), unless you're planning to do the same flavor next time.

Two packets did create a MUCH firmer yogurt, but it was too firm...kind of like milky Jello.  The kids won't eat it LOL  But the flavor is pretty good and it looks appropriately neon-colored.  Back to 1 packet of gelatin next time. Pin It

Mac & Cheese Green Peppers: I screw up so you don't have to

OK, so I posted the recipe here, froze it and am making it today in the crockpot.  If you plan to use a crockpot and cook them from a frozen state, make sure the container you put them in in the first place approximates the size and shape of your crockpot so that you can fit the frozen peppers in later.  I screw up so you don't have to.  Four large peppers will fit crammed into a 5-quart round crockpot.

Quick fixes: put the ones that will fit on HIGH in the crockpot for awhile until they're a bit soft and them cram the remaining pepper in OR let them thaw during the day and bake them 30 minutes or so at 400F (instead of 350F for 45 minutes to an hour) OR order pizza.  Pin It

Mac and Cheese Stuffed Peppers

This is a fabuluoso do-over for leftover mac and cheese, although I think if you have significant amounts of leftover mac and cheese, you're doing something wrong.  Just sayin'.  It's also great to make up a bunch when peppers go on sale at your market and freeze a couple of batches ahead. 

As always, I offer choices in this recipe.  You can cook it in the crockpot (!!) or in the oven, and you can use whatever veggies you want...frozen or canned corn kernels, peas, cut green beans or diced carrots are easiest, but you can certainly use 2-3 cups of something fresh like diced onions, carrots, celery, beets, or chopped greens and saute them for 5-10 minutes until softened.  Quartered cherry tomatoes would be excellent as well.  Or skip the veggies if you have a princess in your household who can detect a hidden pea under 20 mattresses and will have a fit if one should come in contact with the rest of dinner.  If you skip the veggies, you'll need 2 cups of something else...more mac and cheese, or some form of chopped up protein.

You can make mac and cheese from scratch (here is one way to do it...leave out the beef and breadcrumbs, use whatever cheese you like and use sour cream instead of dressing), but I used 1 regular sized box of good ol' Kraft for this.   

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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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