by Donna | Feb 19, 2013
For Christmas, we love to have shrimp! We start out at the end of November having shrimp cocktail and breaded shrimp for our family decorating night. Then we move into the first week of December or so and have Shrimp Alfredo for our White Christmas movie night. (It started out as White Spaghetti and White Christmas…get it?) Then for Christmas Eve, we bring out the cocktail shrimp again.
Then our shrimp days are over. We literally do not have shrimp any other time of year…sadness. Too many teens and young adults and boys and hearty eaters and….well, that equals a lot of shrimp, which equals a lot of money!
So, this is our holiday recipe. However, it is almost as good made with boneless, skinless chicken breast too!
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Shrimp (or Chicken) Alfredo
4 to 6 lbs shrimp (or chicken tenders)
2 or 3 sticks of butter
Italian seasoning
garlic and wine seasoning
black pepper
minced garlic
parsley
oregano
salt
3 lbs fettucini (sp?)
12 oz cream cheese
1 pint half and half
1 pint whipping cream
16 oz (up to 2 lbs, if wanted–don’t use powdered Parmesan!) Italian finely shredded cheese blend (all white)
1. Boil pasta until al dente.
2. Melt butter and add seasonings (not sure of amounts–we just keep adding and tasting!)
3. Detail shrimp (defrost first) and drain/blot with paper towel.
4. Stir fry the shrimp in large skillet in the butter and lots of seasonings. (We do four batches.) Make this as if you were making garlic chicken tenders or shrimp scampi–you want the meat well-seasoned. We hate it when it tastes like pasta with white sauce and boiled chicken or shrimp! 😉
5. Drain the pasta and add the cream cheese and white cheese and stir until they are melted.
6. Add half and half, whipping cream, and shrimp/butter mixture to pasta/cheese mixture. Add lots more yummy seasonings!
7. Stir until yummy and heated through.
Serves twelve hungry people!
by Donna | Feb 13, 2013
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| “Uncooked” ready to turn on high. (I precook and assemble the night before, stick in fridge, then pull out and cook the next day.) |
Easy peasy crock pot meal today!!!
I have a HUGE crock pot. It is actually an amazing one that has three sizes of inserts, so you can do super large, kind of big, and smaller {for dips, small roasts, etc.}.
My favorite crock pot– https://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/product.asp?sku=14764453&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&gclid=CPrx5-DOs7UCFQ84nAodPUUABw
Ingredients–sort of
4 lbs of turkey, skinless kielbasa sausage, cut into rounds
4 lbs of potatoes, peeled and cubed approximately the same size as sausage rounds
2 lbs of frozen green beans
1 or 2 large onions, cut into chunks (I like to stir fry them before adding them.)
pork/smokehouse/ham base (to make “broth”)
Forward (Penzy spice)
Garlic and herb seasoning
basil
black pepper
1. Precook potatoes by steaming in micro or boiling on stove top. (I like to precook my potatoes if I am making a dish where the other ingredients are nearly cooked or fully cooked.)
2. Mix all spices into 3 cups of hot water. Use the amount of base you like for your “broth.”
3. Toss half of the meat and veggies into the crock pot and pour half of the liquid over.
4. Toss second half of the meat and veggies into the crock pot and pour rest of liquid over.
5. Cook–since mine needs to be done in three or four hours, I put it on high for an hour and low for two. You could put it on low for a long time. My crock pot has a WARM setting, so I move into that fairly quickly.
Note: If you do not have the largest crock pot, cut this in half! It makes a full large crock!
by Donna | Feb 10, 2013
We have always been a big leftover family….well, not a big family…well, sort of a big family…but really big on leftovers! My recipes were always tweaked to feed apprxiately four more people than we had at the time–so that we had leftovers for lunch or for “leftover nights” at the end of the week.
One evening when one of my littles did not want to eat their vegetable soup, one of his older siblings said, “You might as well eat it now, or Mom will just have you eat it tomorrow as ‘vegetable soup reloaded,'” meaning that I would do something to it and serve it the next day!
Well, such is the case with my “Baked Potatoes ‘Reloaded'” tip–except in this “recipe,” nobody will ever know that you are “reloading” last night’s food.
Make a ton of baked potatoes on the night that you want to serve them.
1. Clean the potatoes thoroughly and prick them with a fork.
2. Liberally rub each potato with a rub made out of butter and seasonings (we use Mrs. Dash), and place in a large baking pan.
3. Cover tightly with foil.
4. Bake until tender. {Or cook in crock pot all day!}
The “revisited” part: Put the leftovers in the fridge whole that night in a large ziplock bag. Then a day or more later, slice the baked potatoes thinly and layer in a baking dish with cheese, salt, pepper, and a little cream or half and half. Bake (or microwave) uncovered ’til bubbly. Doesn’t take long since potatoes are already baked. Yum!
by Donna | Feb 6, 2013
I told you that last week’s chicken and rice soup was the easiest soup I ever make. Then this one is definitely a close second! It is the same concept–use the crock pot to cook the chicken over night. Stir it up to shred it (it shreds that easily in the crock!), cook your noodles in broth, add seasonings, and put back in the crock on warm.
Here is the unofficial recipe:
Combination of boneless, skinless thighs and breasts (or just one or the other)
Store bought “homemade” noodles
broth (or chicken base to create broth above and beyond the broth created from the cooked chicken)
Seasonings–I used the following: garlic and herb seasoning, parsley, sage, onion powder, garlic powder, dried celery, and Forward (a combination seasoning containing heavy black pepper, paprika…and more…)
1. Cook chicken in large crock pot overnight or all day.
I always start chicken on high for an hour, so it is really hot then turn it to low for the night. I read somewhere years ago that you shouldn’t start chicken on low because it is too low at first, and the chicken could become spoiled–not sure if it’s true, but I’ve always done my chicken this way.
2. Next morning or an hour before dinner: Boil “homemade” noodles in broth until they are al dente.
I keep my soup in the crock all day for my teachers to eat out of, so I don’t fully cook my pastas; they become too soft if they are completely precooked then kept in a warm crock all day. If you are serving this soup immediately and not putting it back into the crock pot, you might want to fully cook the noodles .
3. Optional: If you like more aromatics in your soup (as opposed to onion powder and garlic powder and dried celery), while the noodles are cooking, stir fry small amount of onion and garlic and lots of celery in butter or olive oil until onions are extremely translucent.
4. While noodles are cooking, take two large serving forks and dig into the chicken and shred it.
This will go really fast (like two or three minutes) if your chicken is tender and not overcooked. (I cook my chicken for 8 or 10 hours on low after the hour on high, and it is never tough; you could definitely cook it faster on high, if needed.)
5. Once noodles are done cooking, put noodles, broth and all, into the shredded chicken.
Add the aromatics and the rest of the seasonings. Taste broth and add more base and/or seasonings as needed.
6. Turn on low if noodles were truly al dente and let the flavors mix.
by Donna | Jan 31, 2013
I have discovered new-found freedom in cooking ground meat in my crock pot. This week’s Low Maintenance Chili is an example of this. While I do not have the exact ingredients for the chili (I usually just throw my chili together), I do have some notes on using the crock pot for the meat AND the soup–and for spending very little time doing so.
This “recipe” takes about 15 mins of work time on the part of the cook and only two dishes–the crock pot insert and a strainer/colander to drain the grease. This is a perfect dish for my Crock Pot Wednesday in which I assemble on Tuesday, stick in the fridge, and cook on Wednesday morning. The fifteen minutes of work is really just stirring the meat some and opening the cans and dumping them in.
Ingredients (sort of)
5 lbs of ground beef, uncooked
3 large cans of tomato juice
2 large cans of chili beans or light red kidney beans
1 lb of tiny pasta (ABCs or Acini di pepe–see note below)
chili powder
cumin
beef base
minced onion (or large whole onion, diced finely and cooked until translucent)
garlic powder
oregano
1. Put the 5 lbs of ground beef into a huge crock pot and turn on high.
2. Cook for one hour on high; remove lid and break up/stir with potato masher or other implement you usually use to break up ground meat as it cooks.
3. Cook on low for two more hours (stir once or twice).
4. Drain grease from crock pot/meat thoroughly and put meat back in crock pot.
5. Stir in other ingredients. May need water to finish filling it up–just add more beef base if you use water.
6. Spices–I usually use a lot of chili powder and minced onion; a little of the others; and a TBSP or two of beef base. (The beef base takes away the tomato-y taste/bitter taste that chili can sometimes have. If it still has this, I will add a tsp of sugar or Splenda too.)
7. Either cook now on high for an hour and low for three or four hours or stick crock insert in fridge until you are ready and cook for 90 mins on high then three or four hours on low.
Note about pasta: Cooking foods with pasta in them in the crock pot yields two potential problems for me–1. The pasta doesn’t get done, so I often precook it; 2. If I precook it, or the dish cooks in the crock pot for a long time, the pasta swells up and gets grainy. My family likes pasta in their chili, so I switched to these tiny pastas that do not require precooking but do not swell up so big either. They were a hit!
by Donna | Jan 23, 2013
On Wednesdays, I usually use my crock pot for lunch–regardless of whether it is a true crock pot recipe or not. If it’s not a genuine crock pot dish, I simply assemble all of the ingredients on Tuesday in the crock (with all precooking done ahead of time) and turn the crock on high for an hour then on low until, oh, say 9:00, when my thirty-year-old son who co-teaches with me all day starts to dig into it during class breaks. (I really have “crock pot Wednesday” for him as he adores soups and stews. As a matter of fact, when he was in college and that whole “Got milk?” thing was so popular, I had a t-shirt especially made for him with a steaming bowl of soup in the middle and the words “Got soup?” embroidered on it.)
Today’s crock pot recipe isn’t really a crock pot recipe. It came from a cookbook that a dear friend got me for Christmas: Homestyle in a Hurry (by Gooseberry Patch). But I precooked everything yesterday and threw it in the crock, stuck in the fridge, and got it out and “cooked” as described above. I guess in that way, everything becomes a crock pot meal on Wednesdays! (I teach forty students in four different classes in our cottage class service in our home on Wednesdays, and I can’t watch a boiling pot, so the crock pot is my answer!)
So…here it goes…my revised, um, non-crock pot, slightly changed (always!) Kielbasa Chowder:
1/2 cup butter
1 huge onion, diced finely
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 tsp allspice (I used “Mural of Flavor”)
4 huge potatoes, diced and cooked
6 cups chicken broth
2 quarts half and half
1 (14 oz) packages of frozen yellow corn
1 (14 oz) can shoepeg corn, undrained
2 (14 oz) packages Kielbasa sausage, cut into rounds then in halves (bite sized pieces)
1. Melt butter in small pan over medium high heat.
2. Stir in onions, sprinkle with seasonings, and cook until dark and carmelized, about eight minutes, stirring frequently.
3. Toss everything above into the crock pot except for the broth and half and half. Put crock in fridge overnight.
4. The next morning, get it out and add the broth and half and half. (Sometimes I will heat the ingredients I’m adding to make it heat up faster. Occasionally, I will even stick the whole crock in the micro and speed up the heat through process, then transfer to the crock base.)
5. Heat in crock on high for one hour then turn down on low until heated through/flavors are mixed, about five or six hours.
Serves 12 to 16 people–or four teen/young adult guys!
Note: The real recipe says to just combine the onions, potatoes, corn, and half and half. Divide that in two and process half of it in the food processor. I just used my old fashioned hand-held potato masher to thicken/mash up some of the ingredients.Because I skipped this step and because I put my mixture into the crock pot instead of cooking down on the stove top, I had to further thicken this soup by stirring in mashed potato flakes (my thickener of choice near the end of cooking for many soups and stews!) and microwaving the crock insert (love those removable crocks!) for several minutes uncovered.
