Chicken Bake in the Crock Pot

Raise yo' hand if you have seen this post and image on Pinterest!

It's THE awesomely easy (remember that's the only type of recipes I make) chicken bake.  

Throw it all in a pan, top with Italian dressing seasoning and butter, then shove it in the oven for dinner.  So easy.  BUT it takes an hour to cook, and I don't usually have an hour between when I get home and when we eat dinner.  Hmm, what to do?  

Well,  we could eat dinner a little bit later, but I'm usually half starved and would end up eating 3/4 of a bag of Doritos if I had to wait.  My second solution is to put it in the crock pot!  Yum! 

If you missed my review of the crock pot cook book Fix-It and Forget-It, check it out here.

I love my crock pot mainly because it eliminates the need for me to cook right after I get home.  Plus, it's easy clean up.  So while this recipe is typically baked in the oven, I decided to try to adapt it to my crock pot a few weeks ago.  

Sorry for my glarey pictures.  You understand the concept!

It's very simple.  All you have to do is: dice your potatoes and butter, then butterfly your chicken breast.  (I only use one chicken breast to feed the 2 of us).  Then put the potatoes in the bottom of the crock pot.  Pour a TINY bit of the juice from the beans over them to keep everything from going dry.  Sprinkle the potatoes with the seasoning and put a few pats of butter on them.  

Place your chicken on top and sprinkle with seasoning and include the butter.  

Then finish it off with the beans.  Pour the rest of the seasoning over them and the rest of the butter.

Turn the crock pot on low and enjoy the heavenly smells if you happen to be home while is cooking!

It's just as delicious in the crock pot and even more tender.  So go ahead and give it a try.

Here is the recipe.  Enjoy!

Note: if you are not super duper health conscientious, use a little more butter! : )

Chicken Picca What?

As I mentioned in my first post, my current full time substitute teaching gig is in Home Ec, so school is an adventure every day.  Just last week I had 50 students making breakfast in less than 2 hours.  How tough am I?

Well, one really fun part of Home Ec is naturally the cooking.  I am getting the opportunity to try some new recipes that I've never made and some that I've never heard of.  Enter chicken piccata.

Now I thought I had never heard of it, but I saw on Instagram the other day that the Cheesecake Factory offers it on their menu, so I must've just overlooked it.  I probably moved on since I wasn't sure how to pronounce it.  However, I am not too proud to point to something in the menu for my server.  Some names are hard.  Been to Olive Garden lately?  Gnochi=no-key.  Yeah, I'll just point.

So I've been making recipes at home if I am not too familiar with them.  Last week I decided to try out the chicken piccata before I made it for the kids in school.  Good thing I did...

Chicken piccata is simple enough.  Pound your chicken, dredge, pan fry, then make a lemon sauce for on it.  Not too hard.

So I pounded, dredged, pan fried, and began making the sauce.  Ok, sauce is putting it nicely.  All the recipe said to do was put 1/4 cup lemon juice in the pan and scrape up the bits.  I did this.  1/4 cup doesn't give you a lot of sauce, but I poured it over the chicken none the less.  Then we tasted.

It was terrible.  It was actually quite good if you are in to your food being super tart.

I was kind of confused.  The teacher I'm in for told me the kids usually love this recipe, but I wasn't quite sure based on what I made for lunch that day, so I did some research.

I started researching, Pinterest of course.  I looked at several different recipes until it finally clicked.  Chicken piccata uses chicken broth to help make the sauce.  Viola, the secret missing ingredient.

So the next day I had to demonstrate making chicken piccata in 2 classes.  I used the same recipe but added in 1 cup of chicken broth.  It was deelish!  I can see why the students usually like it.

Picture is courtesy of one of my students!
(This is missing the sauce since we were storing it until the next day.)

So without further adieu, here's the recipe (the good one):