Category: Food

A good crock-pot recipe is worth its weight in gold, so whenever I find one that I particularly like, I’ll share it with you.  See how nice sharing is?  That way you don’t have to pick through the icky ones.

The other day I made this Chicken Tortilla Soup and honestly, I didn’t think it was going to taste very good.  It seemed an awful lot like SALSA to me.  I mean, I like salsa as much as the next guy but I wouldn’t want to just eat a bowl of it.  But it was DELICIOUS.

Chicken Tortilla Soup:

Ingredients:

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (recipe says thighs, but we all know breasts are better than thighs.  At least, mine are.)
2  cans (15 oz each) diced tomatoes, undrained
1 can (4 oz) chopped mild green chilies, drained
1/2 to 1 cup chicken broth
1 yellow onion, diced (I used more like 2 thick slices of onion)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin (I didn’t have any, and it still tasted good, but whatever.)
Salt and black pepper, to taste (salt tasted salty. pepper tasted peppery)
4 corn tortillas, sliced into 1/4 inch strips (I used a pizza cutter and it cut them evenly, lickety split.  However, the dregs of your tortilla chip bag work just as well, or you can crunch some up.  Decide for yourself, based on if you want your pieces of tortilla crunchy or soft.)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro (I told you this sounds like salsa!)
1/2 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese (I used WAY more. Mmmm, cheese!)
1 avocado, peeled, diced and tossed with lime juice
Lime wedges

Directions:
1.  Place chicken in crock-pot.  Combine tomatoes with juice, chilies, 1/2 cup broth, onion, garlic and cumin in a small bowl.  Pour mixture over chicken.
(OK, see how it says “small bowl”?  Well I didn’t think a small bowl would work, so I put it in a small MIXING bowl.  Good thing, hey?)


2.Cover; cook on LOW 6 hours or on HIGH 3 hours, or until chicken is tender.  Remove chicken from crock-pot.  Shred with 2 forks.  Return to cooking liquid.  Adjust seasonings, adding salt and pepper, and more broth if necessary.
(The chicken will really just fall apart if you poke it enough with a wooden spoon – no need to remove from crock-pot and dirty up some dishes).
3. Just before serving, add tortillas and cilantro to crock-pot.  Stir to blend.  Serve in soup bowls, topping each serving with cheese, avocado and a sqeeze of lime juice from wedges.

Yum, yum!

**This recipe is courtesy of the Rival Crock Pot “Three Books in 1” cook book **

The other day, as I was perusing my cookbooks in search of the week’s menu, I found a yummy-looking recipe for peach cobbler. 
“Peach cobbler!” I said, “Yum!” and set about writing down the ingredients on my grocery list. 
“Actually, you know what sounds good?” replied my loving husband, “Blackberry cobbler.  Yum!”. 
So I looked for a recipe for blackberry cobbler.  It has strange (read: icky sounding) ingredients, and you’re supposed to cook it in a slow cooker.  Yea, I know, right?  
So today, after I put Blythe down for her afternoon nap, Alison and I got to cookin’.  We had ripped open approximately 10 packets of sugar-in-the-raw trying to come up with 3/4 cup of ‘granulated sugar’ before I thought I’d better check.  Because I thought, if it was regular sugar it would just say, “sugar” right?  But what is granulated sugar?  So I googled it, and duh.  “Granulated sugar” is just plain table sugar.  Why didn’t they just SAY so?  Alison made it through the “bottom layer”, which is mixing the berries with the (plain old regular) sugar and instant tapioca pudding (what?), before I had to send her to the other room.  For eating sugar under the guise of “smoothing it out”.  And then claiming the sugar around her lips got there by accident while she stirred.
(Does this look oddly like bugs to anyone else?)

So then came the top layer, which involved flour, brown sugar, nutmeg and some other stuff.  I had to open a new package to get the amount of sug’ I needed, and has anyone else noticed that packaging is getting harder and harder to open all the time?
(How on earth am I going to reseal THAT?)
The recipe says it takes 15 minutes of prep time, 4 hours of slow-cooker cook time before you can enjoy your blackberry cobbler.  But maybe leaving the laptop open on the stove was a mistake.

Length of prep time when reading your favorite daily blogs while you stir: approximately the length of a 10-month-old’s afternoon nap (an hour, give or take).


There’s the crock pot, all full of cobbler.  And Alison, in heaven.

So how did it taste, you ask?  Honestly?  Kinda icky.  Just like I thought.