Where We Cook Chicken in a Crock Pot

After making the tapioca yesterday I figured I might as well do something else in the crock pot with the chicken I’d purchased at Luckys that day. $3.97 for the whole thing and you can’t get a better price than the 68¢ a pound they were charging. It's not often I get the crock pot out, so I figured I'd use it again.

So, here’s what happened. I peeked at some other recipes to get a bit of guidance. I’m still a little rusty channeling recipes, though as you will see reading further in this entry I had lots of help.

So, here I am chopping up vegetables and we begin to have an argument about the red pepper. I was for chopping stuff up into uniform sized chunks. We had onions, celery and carrots to work with. Except DeeDude hollered from the other room that I should add green and red pepper. Not my first choice, but hey, he was going to be eating it too, so I grabbed what was left of them from the crisper drawer. Here’s where the arguing began:

Guides: Slice that into long slivers.
Me: What? No. That’s going to be different than the other stuff. It all needs to be diced.
Guides: (Insisting) Slices. Long.
Me: You really want this?
Guides: This is what comes from too many cooks in the kitchen.
Me: Okay, okay. We’ll do it your way.

As I finish up with the red pepper and move on to the green pepper I began to do the same sort of slicing action except this time they said it was okay to slice the green slivers in half. So, we had red peppers the about 4 inches long and the green slices 2 inches long. The carrots I cut into coins and the onions into chop.

The recipe I had read had you putting all the veggies on the bottom of the crock pot, layering chicken pieces on top, slapping the lid on and cooking on high for 4 hours.

I stood there looking at the prepared food dubiously thinking there was something wrong with not adding a bit of liquid. So, I added in half a cup of water. About half way through the cooking process it looked dry so I opened up a little can (lunch box size) of V-8 and poured that on top.

And, so it cooked. When it was pretty much done I realized there was a boat load of liquid collected, so I siphoned off 2 ¼ cups with my bulb baster to use in cooking the cup of raw Uncle Ben’s rice I planned to use as a side dish.

I made the mistake of adding a little bit of cayenne pepper to the rice, but DeeDude liked it. I won’t do that next time, though, because it was too hot for my tastes.

With the next post you’ll see the chicken pot pie I’m making for tonight’s dinner.