4.17.2013

Italian Chicken Stir-Fry - Crock Pot Style!

Lately, I've been more and more into crock pot meals. I used to hate things cooked in the crock pot. But honestly, I'd only had stew beef, and that's not my favorite thing to eat. Recently, I have decided that crock pot meals are awesome! I love coming home from work to a house that smells delicious from the meal that's already cooked.

I have yet to delve into freezer cooking, but that's probably not too far off into the future for me. I don't have a lot of time in the morning to prep food, and there is no way I'm getting up earlier to cook! One of the awesome blogs I follow, Stacy Makes Scents, had a post last week about 6 crock pot freezer meals. They all used chicken, which is good for me cause I've started buying big bags of chicken quarters and freezing them into smaller bags for individual meals. You can find the blog post here.

Here's the recipe I used the other night:

Italian Chicken Stir-Fry

  • 2 Chicken breasts
  • 1 Bag of frozen stir-fry vegetables.
  • 1 bottle of reduced calorie or fat free Italian dressing (You can make your own homemade Italian dressing! ~Stacy)
Combine the ingredients, freeze. Thaw in your refrigerator the night before cooking and throw the contents in the crock pot, 6 hours on low or 4 hours on high. Serve over minute rice.

My chicken (I used leg quarters, not breasts, since that's what I had on hand) was frozen, and so were the stir-fry veggies, but everything wasn't frozen together (since I don't do freezer cooking - yet). That morning, I threw the chicken, veggies, and Italian dressing in to the crock pot and went to work.
When I opened the crock pot lid and saw this, I got a little upset....looks pretty gross, huh?

After work, I whipped up some rice (I don't do minute rice, we just buy the regular white rice in bags, but it only takes 10 minutes or so) and supper was done! It was a good thing, too, since the farrier came that evening to trim my horses' feet so I didn't get inside until close to 8 (and we usually try to eat around 7).
Much better. This was after draining off all the liquid and tearing up the chicken into chunks.
This recipe would have been easier if I had used chicken breasts instead because I had to fish out the chicken and get all the bones out. Not a huge deal, but when its late and you're starving, that process takes forever. I thought it was delicious. DH, not so much. But he's not big on this type of food, so I wasn't too surprised. C liked it until she noticed that her daddy didn't...sigh. Oh well. This dish was even better the next day warmed over for lunch!
The final result. Yum!
If you try this, I'd advice you to use a small bottle of Italian dressing. I used one of the larger sized bottles and it was a little too much. I strained all the liquid out because it was like soup, and the flavor was pretty intense. Also, it probably would have been better for the vegetables if they hadn't cooked all day like mine did. I turned the crock on at around 8:15am and turned it off at 5:30pm. 9 hours is a pretty long time, but it can't be helped in my house. The vegetables weren't mushy, but they had started to turn a little brown where they had sat in the dressing so long. 6 hours like the recipe says is probably perfect. But you gotta make do with what you have, right? ( :

2 comments:

  1. Love crock pot stuff. I'll have to check this one out!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I really loved reading articles about Recipes For Stir Fry and I learned a lot from the previous articles I read. This recipe looks delicious and healthy, I want to taste this one and I. Thank you for sharing this

    ReplyDelete

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