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Tag Archives: crockpot

Recipes image, panda with bowl of rice and chopsticks

Not everything we cook is awesome (cooking attempt #2017-04)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
January 21 2017

This past week, I had a feed from a site that advertises recipe collections where you can assemble all the ingredients for, say, 10 meals at once, and gives you a consolidated ingredient list plus the ten separate recipes. There are a few of these sites around, all geared towards the “busy mom” who can stock pile meals in the freezer and take them out when needed. My wife has had a freezer party or two with her Epicure business, and I think the idea is really solid. In some ways, it is simply assembly line principles applied to dinner prep so that if you’re chopping up meats or veggies, or getting out spices, you do it once instead of 10 separate times with each meal.

For the Epicure meals, it’s more tailored to the individual preparer, so you know what you’re getting. For the sites, usually of the 10 recipes, there are only a few I even like the sounds of, let alone trying them out with a full preparation.  I took the list though, or several lists from the site, and narrowed it down to a few crockpot recipes that sounded both interesting and simple. I confess that I’m looking for some that could be added to the rotation once or twice a month and are worth the effort.

The first one we tried this week was called “Crockpot Honey Mustard Pork Chops and Potatoes”. I said it was simple, and it was — pork chops, onion soup mix, mustard, honey, black pepper, butter and potatoes. Simple to assemble and even simpler for me to say since I did the grocery shopping but Andrea did the assembly in the crockpot in the morning.

The recipe turned out okay, nothing wrong with it, and it looked pretty good.

But it was incredibly bland. And honestly, it was a bit weird with all the butter. It adds a half a stick of butter. That is a LOT of butter. And left a near-oil slick on top of the “broth”. The pork chops were edible, certainly, but the recipe is not worth sharing and not worth repeating. It isn’t even worth starting with as a base to play with other ingredients or adjust elements to make it more interesting.

There are just too many other good recipes out there to waste time on this one again. Guess our cooking attempts can’t all be home runs.

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Posted in Experiences, Family, Goals, Recipes, To Be Updated | Tagged cooking, crockpot, experiences, family, goals, pork | Leave a reply
Recipes image, panda with bowl of rice and chopsticks

Cooking attempt #2017-01 – Sweet Chicken Curry

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
January 5 2017

As part of my goals for the year, I made a list of a bunch of different recipes that I want to try out. From that list, I prioritized a few (a precursor to my Level 1 settings in my goals), and Jacob made the first selection to try — a Sweet Chicken Curry in the Crock Pot / slow cooker (Sweet Chicken Curry (in a slow cooker) (REC0005)) from a diet cookbook. We gave it a go on New Years Day.

It is a relatively easy recipe. Only four ingredients to prep (chicken, a bell pepper, an onion and a tomato), throw them all into a crockpot. Combine four more in a bowl and pour on top. The big ingredient (besides chicken and curry) is in this step — mango chutney!

I confess I couldn’t even find it in the grocery store. I looked in with the pickles and things (condiments generally), nope. Tried breakfast spreads, nope. Somewhere near baking aisle I found some other fruity things, nope. Finally asked. Of course, I’m adding it to a curry recipe like a glaze, so it was where it should be — with the Asian groceries.

Anyway, all combined, it looks like this:

We cooked it 4.5 hours (it suggested 3.5 to 4.5), and then it looked like this:

I figured the result would be at least edible — how far wrong can you go with 8 ingredients, including three veggies and some chicken? But it was the “sweet” mango chutney that made this amazing. I immediately started wondering what else I could put it on…maybe some pork like a glaze for baking. It really is awesome. And listed at just over 300 calories per serving.

Thumbs up from me, Jacob and Andrea…can’t ask for more than that in trying out new recipes.

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Posted in Experiences, Family, Goals, Recipes, To Be Updated | Tagged chicken, cooking, crockpot, curry, experiences, family, goals | Leave a reply
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