My First Two Meals

So, even though I got my crock pot for Christmas I only started using my crock pot a few weeks ago. So, it's easy to bring you all up to speed with my experience so far. I've used it only twice before today (I'll post about the results of today's meal separately). I would say that each of those attempts was good, but not great. But I'm sure that the lessons I learned from those first two attempts will save me many future heartaches.

My very first crock pot recipe ever was for chicken and dumplings (yummy!) from my friend Jennifer Carlen. Being fairly new to Houston, I consider Jenn one of my favorite new friends! (Shameless plug...She's a realtor by the way - so if you're looking to buy or sell, please contact her (www.jennifercarlen.com).) She is always talking about the yummy things she is cooking (and I've had some of her food - it's always amazing!) But this was totally the kind of recipe I was looking for in my first attempt...she was able to share it with a Facebook post. I mean, if it's that easy, surely I couldn't screw it up, right? Of course I can't find the exact post, but it went something like this: "Put chicken breasts, frozen carrots, onions, and celery, and chicken broth in the crock pot on high for 5 hours. Then use canned biscuits and break them into little pieces as the dumplings. Cook for another hour." Jenn, you can correct me for remembering it wrong.

But, seriously it sounded easy enough! So I went to the grocery store and couldn't find frozen celery. Or frozen onions. I think I only know how to find frozen MIXED vegetables, but that wasn't right. So, I settled for frozen carrots only. Had some frozen chicken tenders, so I bought the biscuits and some chicken broth and headed home. I think I put in a bunch of extra liquid (I'll have to write separately one of these days about what I'm learning about liquids!) because I was afraid I had far too many dumplings and that it would turn into one large clump of dough. All in all, it tasted really good (you can't go wrong with chicken, broth, and dough) but was still a little thick. Next time, I would go with my gut and put less of the dumplings in. (I must have bought a super size thing of biscuits.)

My second attempt was from one of my new cook books: FIX-IT and FORGET-IT LIGHTLY : Healthy, Low-Fat Recipes for Your Slow Cooker  Since my husband and I are trying to eat healthier this year, this seemed like a perfect excuse to keep working on crock pot recipes so we could stop eating out so much. We chose the Chicken and Rice recipe (on page 27) - well, because we like chicken and we like rice. :-) And, it was 6 ingredients...throw it all in at one time and cook. Super easy, right? Again, it was tasty, but thick. Did I put in too much liquid? Not enough? The rice got really overly fat so I'm thinking too much liquid. And I substitued long grain brown rice instead of long grain white rice - because I had some.

Here's what this Crock Pot Virgin learned with her first two recipes: When you're just starting out, even though everything sounds as simple as "throw it all in the crock pot and cook it", follow the recipe until you get the hang of it. Don't improvise and think you need more or less of an ingredient...don't substitute something unless you know how it will impact the recipe (I knew, for example, that when I cooked the brown rice as regular rice, I sort of messed that up too)...and if it's in a cook book, they've probably tested it out and it works.

So...for a while at least, I'm going to try sticking to the recipes as they are written until I learn a little bit more and stop overthinking things. Oh yeah, did I mention I'm a business analyst, and my job is to analyze? I'm always trying to "make it better". But I think I need to sit back and be a student of crock pot cooking before I venture out on my own.