I FINALLY bought a slow cooker. I cannot believe it’s taken me this long… We have two dogs and both hubs and I are paranoid about the dogs getting into the slow cooker while we are away, so, I made a gutsy move. I cooked in the slow cooker on Sunday, froze the meal, and reheated on Tuesday. I was nervous. Very nervous. Would it be gross? Stale? Mushy? Only one way to find out…
Here's what I used...
- 2 chicken breasts cut in 2” cubes (uncooked)
- ½ can of chicken broth
- 1 can of diced tomatoes
- 2 cups of sliced, fresh mushrooms
- ¼ cup of diced onions
- 1 cup of sliced olives (I bought pitted olives and sliced them myself)
- 1 teaspoon of cumin
- Sea salt & pepper to taste
- 2 cups of brown rice
Directions – put everything into the slow cooker (excluding the rice) cook on high for 4 hours or low for 8 hours.
If you’re eating right away, serve over a bed of brown rice.
If you’re freezing it, once it’s cooked, take the lid off for about an hour to let it cool down. Once it’s cool enough that it won’t melt your storing container, bag it up and freeze. I took the bag out of the freezer the morning of the day I was going to cook. That evening (still mostly frozen), I put the dinner back in the crock pot and cooked again on high for about 1.5 hours. Served it over the brown rice. It was DELICIOUS! And hubs liked it. So…easy, painless, healthy, AND delicious? To me…that’s a no-brainer!
The only thing I would have done differently was freeze in 2 separate bags for 2 different nights or used less ingredients. We wasted close to half of it because I unfroze it and re-heated it all at once. Lemme tell you…once you cook something, freeze, re-heat it, you don’t want to re-freeze or store and then re-heat again. I think food gets only 1 chance at re-heating, after that it gets thrown away.
