Slow Cooking the Winter Away

Alright! Let's power through a couple of posts and catch up!

Recipe 8:  Slow cooker White Chicken Chili

This is yet another recipe fromBudget Bytes.

I decided to make this before going to the store a few weeks ago, but was apparently not committed enough to actually read the instructions before picking up ingredients. So, some winging occurred.

I have a pretty large crock pot, so I doubled the recipe, as recommended. The main change I made was to use five bone-in chicken legs instead of two breasts. Four servings off one chicken breast? I like Budget Bytes, but I'm not willing to cut back my meat intake to save money to the same extent the author is. Even my mother isn't that Scottish. 

I also bought canned green chilies instead of salsa verde, so I had to add a cup of red salsa to compensate. This made the chili more tea colored then white, but didn't taste too out of place. I also used a yellow bell pepper instead of a jalapeño, because I wanted to be able to offer the chili to my baby.

I also took this opportunity to use up the rest of the great northern beans I had purchased for the White Beans and Sausage. I remembered to soak them overnight this time, and cooked them all day in the crock pot, but they were still a little waxy for my taste. I guess that is just how they are. 

The yeild on this recipe was very good. I believe we ate two dinners and a lunch from it, without really adding sides. I thought it was a little bland at first, so when I reheated it, I added some lime juice, which perked it up. I'm completely willing to conceed that my alterations are probably what made it bland in the first place, so I'll have to try it again sometime with the right ingredients. Since winter seems to be lingering where I live, I'm sure I'll have an opportunity sooner rather than later.

Curried Lentils

Some weeks, I have a lot of banter stored up, but not today, so I'll just cut to the chase:

Recipe 5:  Curried Lentils

For this recipe, I turned once again to Budget Bytes.  I had seen the recipe for curried lentils a few weeks ago, and kept it in mind. Last week I picked up a pack of chicken legs on sale, and had too many for one pot of chicken and dumplings, but too few for two meals with chicken as the main protien. Lentils + chicken seemed like the perfect solution.

I was happy to have an excuse to try the recipe, because we are a lentil eating family. Generally, I'll throw a bag of lentils in the crock pot with some carrots, onions, a bay leaf or oregano, and some broth or bullion. Top that with two pieces of bacon, and you've got a hearty, nutritious
(if somewhat unappealing looking) soup. We are moving out of winter, though, and soon earthy flavors will seem a bit heavy. So another use for lentils was very welcome.The dish went together pretty easily. Often, I find that my cooking times are longer than the recipe calls for, which I think is because I'm still getting used to cooking on stainless steel, so I use lower heat than I really should. In addition to cooking the vegitables longer, I had to boil the lentils maybe 10 minutes longer than recommended, and they were still a bit unevenly cooked. Next time, I might try using a bigger pot or keeping the temperature up a bit (I turned it down to three). I could just be overcooking my lentils when I do them in the crock pot, of course, so maybe they are supposed to retain a bit of resistance.

The flavor was very nice. Two tablespoons of curry powder is quite a bit, so each bite had a nice slow burn. Our son didn't have much that day, but did have some when I ate the leftovers cold as a snack (of course, that may have had more to do with needing to mooch on Mom's food than actually enjoying the flavor).

To me, the one flaw was the amount of tomato sauce. It ended up feeling a bit thick, and I thought the tomato flavor was a little overwhelming. Because the recipe calls for one can of sauce, the next time I make it, I might try doubling all of the other ingredients, and maybe save a little of the liquid the lentils cooked in to thin it a bit.

Overall, though, it was a nice dish that I think will make it into the regular rotation of recipes to make when meat is expensive.

In Which the Author Realizes that She is a Creature of Habit.

So, over the weekend I tried my third NYR recipe, based on a Budget Bytes email.  I've been receiving these emails for over a year, and largely ignoring them.  That is one of the reasons I decided to make my New Year's Resolution to cook a new recipe every week.  It was starting to make me feel dumb that I was getting all kinds of new recipes sent to me, but I was still cooking the same handful of meals week after week.

I like Budget Bytes because the author really seems to try to present simple recipes.  She also breaks down what she paid for each ingredient, and calculates the cost per serving for her dishes.

So, without further ado...

Recipe 3:  White Beans with Tomato and Sausage

Here is the recipe.  I won't copy it out again here because I actually managed to make this dish without meaningful substitutions!


Wait a second, you are probably saying, what does "meaningful" mean?  Well, I didn't put whole wheat flour where only white belonged, or switch around a bunch of acids, so I consider my changes to be minimal.

The first change I made was to use dried great northern beans (btw, are these from Canada?  I can't think of them as anything other than "Great White Northern" beans) instead of canned.  Beth of Budget Bytes talks about how they are less expensive than cannellini beans, but I still couldn't find any for less than $2.50 a can at my grocery store.  Maybe they have a secret low class name with a cheaper price, or maybe Texans just don't eat them.  In any case, I went with the $.88 a pound dried beans instead.  I bought two 1 pound bags at the grocery store, but thankfully looked here and realized that just one pound dried beans would do the duty for two 15 oz cans.

Now, here we come to the inspiration for the title of this blog post.  I picked this recipe and bought the ingredients on Monday.  I planned to cook it over the weekend.  I thought about it all week.

Did I soak the beans on Friday, or even Saturday night?  Nope.  Apparently if I don't normally do something after dinner, I have to write myself a note backwards on my forehead to actually make sure it gets done.

Thankfully, there was a "quick soak" cooking method listed on the package.  So, now I can pass this mistake off as wanting to provide extra information to my blog readers.  The method they recommended was to rinse the beans, put them in a pot with 2" of water covering them, then boil for two minutes and let sit covered for an hour.  I had to repeat this twice, draining the water in between, to get them to cook, and even then they were a little more firm than I think they should have been.  This was my first time cooking great northern beans, though, so it's possible it is how they are supposed to be.  (They also way more than doubled in volume, creating probably three and a half cups of leftover beans.) In any case, I'm glad I was able to proceed with the recipe, but I'll have to be extra careful the next time I want to do something with dried beans.

Once I had fixed my bean mistake, the recipe went together with relatively little fuss.  I used stewed tomatoes instead of crushed, because that is what I keep in my pantry.  I think this added to the cooking time because I had to chop up the tomatoes after adding them to the pan, and I believe they are packed in a little more liquid than crushed tomatoes are.

Overall, I think the dish came together well, and made a good meal.  There are just two things I am disappointed about with this recipe.  First, there isn't enough meat.  Two sausage links, especially cut into rounds, made it seem like most bites didn't have meat in them.  In the future, I think I'll either cook the sausage without the casing, so that it distributes more evenly, or just put more in.  The second complaint is a bit of a nit-pick.  I went with extra finely chopped frozen spinach, because I couldn't find the big blocks of spinach in the freezer case. The spinach basically dissolved, turning the lovely red sauce into a murky brown. Not a huge problem, but a little annoying.

To wrap this up, I want to apologize for publishing this so late. I started writing it on Monday, but the kiddo has been getting up really early and there has been a lot of housework to do. I also started The Red Queen by Phillippa Gregory, and of course a new book can be a time suck.  I tried my next recipe last night, so I'll try to get another update out tomorrow.