Chicken and Noodles (Recipe Included)

I'm slacking already at keeping up with my posts! Today's meal is really from Wednesday night's dinner. Maybe it was a subconscious thing - I thought it was good, but not great. So maybe I wasn't in such a hurry to post it. Either way, I need to stay on top of these things. :-)

This meal was from a new site - Campbell's Kitchen. Yep, that's Campbell's as in Campbell's soup. I figured many recipes call for using soup of some sort, so I took a peak at what they had to offer and found this chicken and noodle meal. There are many slow cooker recipes on their site, so I think I'll be trying more, but here's how this meal went down.

Here is the recipe for their Golden Chicken and Noodles:

2 cans (10 3/4 ounces each) Campbell's® Condensed Cream of Chicken Soup (Regular or 98% Fat Free)

1/2 cup water

1/4 cup lemon juice

1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard

1 1/2 teaspoons garlic powder

8 large carrots, thickly sliced (about 6 cups)

8 skinless, boneless chicken breast half  (about 2 pounds)

4 cups egg noodles, cooked and drained

Chopped fresh parsley

1. Stir the soup, water, lemon juice, mustard, garlic powder and carrots in a 3 1/2-quart slow cooker. Add the chicken and turn to coat.
2. Cover and cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours* or until the chicken is cooked through. Serve with the noodles. Sprinkle with the parsley.
3. *Or on HIGH for 4 to 5 hours.
4. Serving Suggestion: Serve with buttered peas. For dessert serve with butterscotch pudding garnished with whipped topping.

My ingredient modifications:

• I used baby carrots instead of the 8 cut up carrots. This actually worked out great! They cooked nicely and were easy just to dump in. No peeling and cutting. 
• I only used 1.5 pounds of chicken - it just looked like SO MUCH chicken as I was measuring it out, and because I like a lot of sauce with my pasta, I was afraid this would make it too dry. Yet again, it would have been fine with the full 2 lbs. Karie, you have to learn that liquids is not a problem! I also cut the chicken into chunks instead of the leaving the breast tenders whole. (This might have attributed to the problem I had where it seemed to cook too fast.)
• My picture shows only one lemon, but I ended up needing 1 1/2 lemons to get 1/4 cup. I even used all the tricks I know for getting as much juice out of a lemon as possible (rolling it and microwaving for 7 seconds). It still took an extra 1/2 lemon.
• And I didn't add parsley at the end - only because the hubby is not a real fan of parsley.

All mixed up and ready to go! Now, this seemed easy enough - but again, proved to me that I don't think I could leave a crock pot cooking at home by itself. I stirred this a couple times because it just looked like it needed it. (Maybe I need to stop looking at it?) And after about 4 hours, the edges started browning which made me very nervous. Seriously, is my crock pot just cooking too hot? Any tips on how to help prevent this from happening?

This seems to only happen with my 4qt bowl, although honestly, I haven't used my 2qt or 6qt bowl for anything soupy to know how it would look in there. This picture was after only 5.5 hours, so I cut it back to warm since the chicken was also done. Like I mentioned above, I think cutting the chicken into smaller pieces helped it cook faster. Is that true? Or just my made up reasoning? :-)

And voila! It was good - I don't want to imply it was bad. But I feel like it was missing something. I added a little salt to mine (maybe I could have used garlic salt instead of garlic powder?) or maybe the parsley on top really would have given the additional flavor that I felt was lacking. My hubby thought maybe some garlic bread on the side would have helped - maybe added a little bit of satiating fat to the meal (I used 98% fat free soup, so there was very little fat in this dish).

None of the ingredients really stood out except for the soup. There was just a minor hint of lemon (I mostly noticed it eating the carrots) but my husband said he didn't taste any at all. Also, the dijon mustard was not noticeable - but turns out that was a good thing. My husband told me he doesn't really like dijon mustard in sauces (I've made other non-crock-pot recipes before with it).

Overall, I think it was a good, steady meal. Probably very kid-friendly since nothing was very overpowering. But I think I'll move on to trying other meals before circling back to try and adjust this one.