SMOKED CHICKEN AND CREAMY CHEESY RED POTATOES

My dinner tonight was awesome! I had decided to try my slow cooker as a smoker. I had seen it used before for smoking meat so I decided to try smoking chicken. Now I used mesquite chips and a mesquite rub for the meat and I only used a half of a chicken. If you do a whole chicken I would suggest increasing the time by an hour or so. My chicken came out very moist and tender. It just fell off the bone and the flavor was just like the smokehouse flavor. This proved to be a lot easier than standing outside all day smoking my chicken in a big smoker. I am going to have to try a brisket next time. So then I found this new recipe from Food.com for creamy cheesy red potatoes and filled up another crock pot. The potatoes at first seemed a little soupy but after I turned off the crock pot the liquid thickened up. The potatoes were good and creamy. I wouldn't have thought that sour cream and cottage cheese would go together but they did. Then I went ahead and wrapped up the corn on the cob in foil with a little butter and garlic and put it in another crock pot. No sense in heating up my house by using my oven just for corn. My dinner was done by noon and I was able to have a free afternoon. YEA! Next time I will have to add a dessert too.

SMOKED CHICKEN

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Mesquite chips wrapped in parchment paper.

 INGREDIENTS:

2 cups of smoker chips (any flavor like mesquite, hickory or pecan)

Parchment paper

2 large chicken breasts

Any dry rub (I used mesquite)

1 tbs. of liquid smoke

1 cup of water

DIRECTIONS:

Soak the smoker chips in water for 20 -30 minutes. Then drain them and wrap them in parchment paper and place them seam side down in the bottom of the crock pot. Punch several holes in the parchment paper to allow the steam to escape. Rub the dry rub all over the chicken breasts. Place them on top of the parchment paper. Pour a cup of water mixed with the liquid smoke in the bottom of the crock pot. Cover and cook on high for 6 hours or low for 8 hours.    

Creamy Cheesy Red Potatoes

INGREDIENTS:

7 cups of cubed red potatoes uncooked

½ cup of sour cream

½ cup of Velveeta cheese cubed

8 oz. of small curd cottage cheese

½ tsp of salt

2 cloves of garlic minced

1 tbs. of onion flakes

DIRECTIONS:

Spray the crock pot with PAM. Place the cubed potatoes in the crock pot. Combine the cottage cheese and sour cream and mix until smooth. Add the salt, onion flakes and cubed Velveeta and stir. Pour over potatoes and mix well. Cover and cook on low 5 -6 hours.

For corn on the cob I just butter it and sprinkled it with garlic and parsley powder and wrapped it in foil. Put it in the crock pot on low for 6 hours and it comes out like roasted corn. It would be good with a little mayonnaise, chile powder, and lime on it too.There are many different flavor combinations you can try on roasted corn that would be delicious.  

ITALIAN CHEESY TORTELLINI

It’s Monday morning and here I sit at my kitchen table with my first cup of coffee and my laptop in the peace and quiet. No one else is up, no one is asking for breakfast, and I don't actually have anything to do today. Maybe it will be a ME day? After working all weekend and having heard all the news releases and the announcement from Food Network about not renewing Paula Dean’s contract I am just worn out. So I am sitting here secretly hoping maybe, just maybe if I stay home today that the Food Network might call me in as her replacement. They have an open spot now right?  What do you think? Cooking With The Crockologist, coming soon on Sunday evenings prime time. Can I even begin to fill her shoes? I am not sure I have that many crock pot recipes yet and certainly not with butter. I had better get started working on those recipes! So with that said here is my recipe of the week. This was a really quick and easy dinner for me this week.  The original recipe called for browning the meat but I didn't do that because the meat would cook and be covered by the marinara sauce. The only thing I did do was before adding the tortellini I scooped out some of the grease with a big spoon. I would have eliminated this step if I had browned the meat first but I am lazy and didn't want to wash another pan so I did it before I added the cheese and tortellini. Anyway the finished product was very delicious and cheesy. Tasted almost like lasagna. I served it with a salad and garlic bread. Another quick way to make this would be to use Italian meatballs as the meat and you could cut the cooking time in half and not have the grease either. Then you say why use a slow cooker,why not just use my oven? I use a slow cooker a lot because it allows me to leave the house and do other things like take phone calls from the Food Network, sign contracts, do kitchen remodeling and still feed my family.

INGREDIENTS:

½ lb. of hamburger meat

½ lb. of Italian sausage with casing removed

1  14 oz.  jar of marinara sauce

1 can of sliced mushrooms

1   9 oz. package of cheese tortellini thawed 

½ cup of shredded cheddar cheese

1 cup of mozzarella cheese

DIRECTIONS:

Spray crock pot with PAM.  Combine the ground beef and Italian sausage and place in crock pot. Then add the mushrooms and marinara sauce. Cover and cook on low for 7-8 hours or on high for 5 hours. Thirty minutes before serving stir in the tortellini and cover with cheese and cook on low until the tortellini is tender.

 

PINTO BEANS IN THE CROCK POT

I recently have been asked for some vegetarian recipes for the crock pot. Now I am not vegetarian so I had to do some searching because I wanted them without any chicken or beef broth added. I found plenty of recipes with most of them calling for beans as a replacement for the meat. So the problem is I like beans but not canned beans so I decided to make a pot of pinto beans so that I would have fresh beans for my recipe. I have always soaked my beans overnight and cooked them on the stove with a leftover ham bone but that’s not vegetarian. So I decide just to cook them in the crock pot with seasonings and no meat. My beans turned out wonderful. Very tender and tasty and I didn't even have soak them first. Now when you make a pot of beans you end up with a lot of them so I had some for lunch and then divided up the rest of them in several containers and put them in the freezer to use in recipes later. We had some friends over swimming on Saturday and I have a little friend that loves refried beans on flour tortillas otherwise known as a bean burrito. So I got out one of my containers of beans and put it in a little food processor I had and added some of the juice, some seasoning and pureed it. Homemade refried beans! I think she liked them a lot she ate almost three burritos. I tasted a bite of them with some melted cheese and thought how good these are! They are a lot healthier than restaurant beans because I added bean juice instead of lard and tasted a lot better than canned beans because there were no preservatives added. So here is the first of my vegetarian recipes. Next week I will be trying a cornbread and bean casserole with some of my homemade pinto beans. 

INGREDIENTS:

3 cups of dry pinto beans

1 chopped onion

5 tsp. of salt

4 tsp. of pepper

1 tsp. of cumin

4 cloves of garlic minced

9 cups of water

DIRECTIONS:

Rinse the beans. Then place all the ingredients in the crock pot, cover and cook on low for 8 hours. To make refried beans I used a slotted spoon and put several cups of beans in the food processor. Added some of the liquid and pureed it. Then transferred it to a bowl, sprinkled some cheese on it and heated it in the microwave for some delicious refried beans that can be served with crock pot fajitas or on flour tortillas as burritos.

MONGOLIAN BEEF

This has been a really tough week for us at my house. Our cable has been out for most of the week. Unfortunately we have a bundle to save money so that means the internet and lan phone was out as well. So when it came time to do some cooking all my recipes that I was going to try in the crock pot this week were still on line. I have come to depend so completely on the internet that I had to stop and think what I did before cable and the internet? So I found myself at my local library looking up recipes in a cookbook. NOT! I was on their internet. But before I went to the library I did go thru my mother’s old cookbooks and found several crock pot recipes that I will be trying out next week. These recipes were handwritten on paper that had turned yellow with age. Growing up I don’t remember my mother using a crock pot that much but I guess she did. Anyway I keep running across several Mongolian beef recipes that I have wanted to try. Some seemed very complicated and others seemed easy so I combined a few and here is what I came up with. It came out very delicious, the meat of course was very tender, the cornstarch had thickened the sauce just enough, and the taste had just the right amount of sesame flavor. I garnished it with extra chopped onions at the end and served it over rice. This could become my next crowd pleaser it was so good!

INGREDIENTS:

1 – ½ lbs. of beef flank steak cut in stir fry strips

1 tbs. of olive oil

1 tsp. of sesame oil

½ tsp. of minced ginger

2 cloves of minced garlic

¾ cup of water

¾ cup of brown sugar

¾ cup of soy sauce

¼ cup of cornstarch

¼- ½  tsp. of crushed red peppers

Chopped green onions and shredded carrots if you want to add vegetables

DIRECTIONS:

Spray the crock pot with PAM. Then coat the steak strips with the cornstarch. Then add the other ingredients to the crock pot and stir well. Place the steak in and gently stir. Cover and cook on low 4-6 hours or on high 3-4 hours. Serve over rice or noodles. 

SMOTHERED PORK CHOPS

As usual I had a lot going on this week and hadn't made itto the grocery store yet so there wasn't much left to eat in my house. The onlything I had in my freezer were pork chops. Then after rummaging around in therefrigerator I found the corn and potatoes so I decided to do a wholedinner in the crock pot. After trying the ranch dressing on beef and chicken Idecided it might be good on pork chops.  I used the cream of celery soup because that’swhat I had in left in my cabinet. I think it turned out very delicious. I knewthe baked potatoes and corn in the foil would be good because I have done thembefore but never with the meat and gravy on the bottom.  I thought it might taste funny and be reallymessy so I decided to use parchment paper to separate the layers and it workedout great. I was able to remove the potatoes and corn and throw away the paperwithout too much of a mess. The pork chops were tender with a ranch taste andthe potatoes were soft and even better with some of the soupgravy on them. So I just added some bread and dinner was done! So easy, witheverything in one pot! Not much to clean up. The cooking in the foil reminds ofmy Girl Scout days when we would cook our individual meals in foil in thecoals. I think I will have to try some of those meals in the crock pot and seeif they would work. Everyone could individualize their own dinner and the cleanup would be really easy.  

  

INGREDIENTS:

4-6   boneless pork chops

1 package of ranch dressing mix

1  10 oz. can of either Cream of Celery, Mushroom, or Chickensoup

4   washed potatoes

4  ears of shucked  corn

DIRECTIONS:

Spray the crock pot with PAM. Then put the pork chops on thebottom. Pour the dressing mix all over the pork chops and follow with the canof soup. No need to add any water. Then I placed a piece of parchment paperover it. You can use foil if you don’t have parchment paper. Next I butteredand seasoned my potatoes and corn and wrapped them each individually in foil.Place the potatoes on top of the paper, and then add the corn. Cover and cookon low for 6 hours or on high for 4-5 hours.