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What a crock!
posted Tuesday, 23 January 2007
This week, my school gives its semester exams. It's the first time in my life that I've had exams in January. Since my exams are on the last two days of exams, I haven't had anything to do the past few days except finish writing my exams and prepare for teaching after exam week (since I'll be busy grading my exam after I give it). Still, it has meant relatively liesurely days, which has allowed me time to play around in the kitchen. The weather seems to cry out for crock pot cooking, so that's what I've been doing.
On Monday, I played around with chicken and rice. I just put a package of chicken breasts in the bottom of the crock pot and added 4 cups of chicken broth (actually, 4 cups of water with 2 boullion cubes), 1 cup unprepared brown rice, a can of mushrooms, a couple onions, and a bunch of spices (no particular amount of rosemary, thyme, fresh parsley, a dash of red pepper flakes). When ready, salt and pepper to taste. It was pretty decent, though nothing really exceptional. The chicken ended up rather dry, but fortunately the rice was moist enough to compensate.
Even though I'm still working on the leftovers of that, I tried something else today, I just threw some chicken breasts and a spicy bbq sauce into the crock pot. That turned out all right, though the chicken was still on the dry side. There's got to be some way to prevent that. Even if it wasn't dry, this would have been pretty dull, but here's how I dressed it up: I wrapped it in fried bread. I just mixed up a dough of white and whole wheat flours and a bit of sugar, added water until a dough formed, and then worked it a while. I pressed it out relatively thin and then used it to wrap the chicken with a blend of mozzarella and cheddar cheeses, then fried the little package in oil. It took some finessing, but I kept working at it until it was browned on all sides, and it was pretty darn good.
On Monday, I played around with chicken and rice. I just put a package of chicken breasts in the bottom of the crock pot and added 4 cups of chicken broth (actually, 4 cups of water with 2 boullion cubes), 1 cup unprepared brown rice, a can of mushrooms, a couple onions, and a bunch of spices (no particular amount of rosemary, thyme, fresh parsley, a dash of red pepper flakes). When ready, salt and pepper to taste. It was pretty decent, though nothing really exceptional. The chicken ended up rather dry, but fortunately the rice was moist enough to compensate.
Even though I'm still working on the leftovers of that, I tried something else today, I just threw some chicken breasts and a spicy bbq sauce into the crock pot. That turned out all right, though the chicken was still on the dry side. There's got to be some way to prevent that. Even if it wasn't dry, this would have been pretty dull, but here's how I dressed it up: I wrapped it in fried bread. I just mixed up a dough of white and whole wheat flours and a bit of sugar, added water until a dough formed, and then worked it a while. I pressed it out relatively thin and then used it to wrap the chicken with a blend of mozzarella and cheddar cheeses, then fried the little package in oil. It took some finessing, but I kept working at it until it was browned on all sides, and it was pretty darn good.
Your comments, as always, are most welcome. (5)