Tag Archives: meals

Crock Pot Sour Cream Salsa Chicken

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I wasn’t expecting this to be the week of “things that include salsa and taco seasoning”, but so be it. Sometimes, you just get lucky.

This particular dish is a favorite of ours because it’s stupid-easy to make and can be eaten in a variety of ways. You can shred the chicken – or not. You can eat it on a tortilla (or flatbread) with cheese and lettuce, on bok choi with cheese, on rice…so many ways to make it work. It’s also yummy any time of year – so it’s not something that you feel is a fall or winter-only dish. Versatile, easy & yummy…those are definitely perfect characteristics of a great crock pot dish, in my opinion. Note: even though I list the cooking time as 6-8 hours, this one can definitely go all day. We routinely let it go for 11 hours and it’s perfectly fine!

One other thing of note to parents of wee ones: we tend to serve the chicken and sauce separately, to keep the kiddos happy. It’s up to you how you want to serve it, but you may find that having them separate at the dinner table cuts down on some of the “I don’t want SAUCE!” complaints that we get from the little ones. In their defense, though, I would like to point out that it was dd’s suggestion to put it on bok choi this time out. Even though she didn’t eat all of her leaf tonight, the fact that she’d even suggest it means that the CSA experiment has already borne some seriously good fruit. Yeay!!

 

Crock Pot Sour Cream Salsa Chicken

Chicken, sauce, cheese & bok choi...OM NOM NOM

 

Prep Time: 5 mins

Cooking Time: 6-8hrs on LOW

Serves: 4

 

Ingredients

2 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts (1-1/4 to 1-1/2lbs total)

16 oz jar salsa

1 pkg (1/4 cup) low-sodium taco seasoning

2 Tb cornstarch

3 Tb water

1/2 cup sour cream

Optional toppings: shredded cheese, shredded lettuce

 

Make it Happen

1. Coat the inside of a 4qt crock pot with non-stick spray.

2. In a bowl, stir to combine salsa and taco seasoning. Spread a small amount of the mixture on the bottom of the crock pot, to create a small liquid bed for the chicken.

3. Place the chicken breasts in the crock pot. Pour the remaining salsa/taco seasoning mixture on top of the chicken evenly, so that the breasts are fully covered.

4. Cover and cook on LOW for 6-8 hrs (or up to 11 hrs, really, based on my experience).

5. Just before serving, remove the chicken breasts from the crock pot. If you plan to shred them, now’s a good time. Otherwise, just place them on a plate or in a serving bowl.

6. Mix the cornstarch and water in a small bowl and add to the salsa mixture in the crock pot; stir to combine.

7. Add the sour cream to the crock pot; stir to combine.

8. Either spoon the sauce over the chicken or place it in some other serving dish (we use a gravy boat). Serve the chicken and sauce with your choice of toppings (such as shredded cheese and lettuce) on your choice of bed/delivery vehicle (bok choi, soft tortilla, flatbread, rice, etc.).

CSA Cleanout Crock Pot Pork Tenderloin

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This one is a recipe of necessity: my CSA veggie boxes have taken over the fridge! The counters, the fridge…everywhere I look there are veggies that need a home: in our BELLEHS. It also didn’t help that I spent part of the evening Sunday night trying to figure out which potatoes survived the house turning into a fridge for a few days (the answer: NOT the new potatoes or the red potatoes, sadly). We also have a week coming up where generating leftovers is a bad idea.

Thus, many of the items in this dish came from our CSA veggie boxes, specifically: the onions, sweet potatoes, apples, carrots and honey. The bulk of the prep time in this dish, well – ALL of the prep time, really, came from the chopping that takes up steps 1-5, below. The rest of it is about a 5 minute process. So, if you want to do any of this the night before, I’d recommend going for it.

We have large plastic containers in our house for just such a reason – so the onions, sweet potatoes, shallots and apples were all prepped the night before. TIRED ME, I put the apples on the top of the container with the sweet potatoes. Were I being smart, the apples would’ve gone on the bottom of the container so that I could’ve just upended the thing right into the crock pot and had them in the order I wanted. (I prefer to put onions and the root veggies at the bottom of the crock pot so that they can take the bulk of the heat – they tend to stand that much better than, say, apples, which would just turn straight into applesauce.)

The carrots were cut up in the morning too, only because I was out of energy by the time I was done with a long day that I capped off with prepping onions, potatoes, shallots and apples for the next morning. And, really, if your fear is that the apples might turn brown as they oxidize: feel free to let go of that fear. First, if you have the lid on your container fairly tight, that problem may be minimized. Second, if they’re going in the crock pot, you’ll never notice whether they turned brown overnight or not.

This dish came out sweet and yummy. We didn’t pair it with a starch, but you certainly could serve this with some rice or couscous. The sauce is plentiful and light in nature, and it lends a nice sweetness to the whole thing. Because we let it go for longer than the required cook time, the pork just fell apart on us (never a bad thing), and both the sweet potatoes and apples just fell apart on the tongue. Again, this is a good problem to have.

I would say that this is a recipe that could easily be done with chicken instead of pork BUT I would then adjust the cook time down to 6-8 hrs.

 

CSA Cleanout Crock Pot Pork Tenderloin

Porktastic!

Prep Time: 30-40 min
Cooking Time: 8-10 hrs on LOW
Serves: 4

Ingredients
2 small (or 1 large) yellow onions
2 large sweet potatoes
1 shallot
5 medium empire apples
6 medium/large carrots
1-1/2 lbs pork tenderloin
14-1/2 oz can low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup apple juice
2 Tb cider vinegar
2 Tb wildflower honey
1 Tb brown sugar

Make it Happen
1. Peel and thinly slice the onion(s); place in the bottom of a 5qt oval crock pot in a single layer. They should cover the majority of the bottom of the crock pot.

2. Wash and chop the sweet potatoes into pieces no more than about 1/2″ thick and 1″ wide. Place the sweet potatoes in the crock pot.

3. Peel and mince the shallot. Sprinkle about one-third of the shallot on top of the sweet potatoes.

4. Peel the carrots and remove the ends; chop into small rounds, no more than about 1/3″ thick. Place in the crock pot. Sprinkle about one-third of the shallots on top of the carrots.

5. Wash the apples; slice in half, remove the core and then cut the apples into roughly 12 slices. Place the apples in the crock pot; sprinkle the remaining shallots on top of the apples.

6. Place the pork tenderloin on top of the apples. Pour the broth on top of the tenderloin and pour around it, on top of the apples and veggies.

7. In a measuring cup, pour the apple juice and the cider vinegar; pour this combination on top of the tenderloin and then around it, on top of the apples and veggies.

8. Drizzle the honey on top of the tenderloin, using either the flat of the spoon or a brush to coat the top of the tenderloin evenly with the honey.

9. Sprinkle brown sugar on top of the tenderloin.

10. Cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hrs.

11. Remove pork from crock pot and cut into 1/2″ thick pieces before serving with veggies, apples & sauce.

Bok-os!

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Problem #1: the week 7 veggie box shows up with just over 2lbs of bok choi in it. Holy carp…what am I going to do with TWO POUNDS of bok choi?

Problem #2: the usual Saturday evening blahs over what to have for dinner on the one unplanned night of the week, and we were missing one of the usual key ingredients. We decided to make tacos, and though it took some convincing, I was finally able to persuade dh that if you have no ground turkey in the house, the taco gods will still approve of you making tacos with diced chicken. [We don’t typically use ground beef – the one exception being the “meatloaf mix” of ground beef and pork that we get from BJ’s a couple of times a year.]

…and then I said, “What if we use bok choi instead of taco shells?” We had taco shells in the house. As a matter of fact, we had two boxes of them, due to a shopping oops on my part a few weeks before. Still, the idea intrigued him. “So, what – it would be like the lettuce cups from PF Chang’s?” he asked. Yep, that was the idea.

So, we created the tacos in the usual fashion (less the ground turkey) and then put them on bok choi leaves instead of taco shells. The verdict? OMG, this may be the only way I have tacos again if I can ever help it. And thus, we proudly present…

BOK-OS!

Note also that this is a bit healthier than using the shells – at least 100 cal less. And, you get all the benefits of the hard shell (crunch!) with the benefit of the soft taco (no breakage!). It’s really a win-win situation.

Bok-os

Bok-os: Crunchy, soft, healthy...what a combination!

Prep Time: 5 mins

Cooking Time: 15-20 mins

Serves: 4

Ingredients

1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breasts

1 Tb olive oil

1/2 pkg reduced sodium taco seasoning

2/3 cup water

4 leaves bok choi, washed

toppings of your choice (we went with reduced fat sour cream, shredded monterey jack/cheddar blend, and medium-heat salsa)

Make it Happen

1. Dice the chicken breasts (small pieces) and cook with the olive oil in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat.

2. When the chicken is fully cooked, add the taco seasoning and water; stir to combine and stir frequently throughout cooking to ensure no sticking.

3. Once the majority of the liquid is gone from the pan, remove the chicken from the heat. Serve on leaves of bok choi (one per person), with the toppings of their choice, and fold the leaf as you’re eating it (like a soft taco shell).