Every Wednesday is Domestic Science day at Living Behind the Curve.

This week’s slow cooker recipe is one of my all-time favorites — on average, we eat this twice a week. Great as-is, or over rice with fried noodles and duck sauce.

Orange Teriyaki Chicken

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 pounds boneless skinless chicken
• 8 ounces canned sliced water chestnuts
• 8 ounces canned sliced bamboo shoots
• 16 ounces raw baby carrots
• 2 tablespoons corn starch
• 3/4 cup chicken broth
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons teriyaki sauce
• 1 teaspoon mustard powder
• 2 teaspoons orange juice concentrate
• 1/2 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

SRSLY method: Combine all ingredients in zip-top bag and freeze. Place frozen meal in slow cooker and heat on low for 6-8 hours.

Standard slow-cooker method: Combine all ingredients in a slow cooker over low heat and cook for 3-4 hours.

Serves 4-6 over rice.

Every Wednesday is Domestic Science day at Living Behind the Curve.

In response to my call for reader-submitted recipes, Jen wrote:

I must admit I got this from someone who got it from someone else, who adapted it from a medieval recipe.

I haven’t tried yet, but I’m going to mix together everything but the chicken
in a bag, and see if it works to just add it to the chicken in the crock pot and
cook it up.

It sounds delicious, and I’ve had several similar dishes, so I’m looking forward to trying this one. In my experience, recipes like this translate very well to slow cooking and SRSLY.

Medieval Spiced Chicken

Ingredients:

• 4 pounds chicken parts (thighs work well) - bone in, skin off
• 1 tablespoon each of cumin, cinnamon, and garlic powder
• chicken broth to cover 1″ of the bottom of the pot (about 1/2 cup in my slow cooker, 1-2 cups in larger ones)
• optional: raisins, sliced apricots, sliced almonds - 1/4 cup each

Combine all ingredients and cook on low for 4-6 hours.

~~

If you have a recipe you’d like to share, submit it via our contact form.

Thanks, Jen!

Every Friday is 11 Things day at Living Behind the Curve.

We’ve had a fair amount of new traffic and subscribers this week, and almost all of it was for our cooking posts and, more specifically, our SRSLY system. No matter where you came from or what page you landed on when you got here, welcome! Please kick off your shoes, raid the fridge (or the slow cooker), and get comfy.

It just so happens that this food-related traffic coincides with our semi-monthly “not cooking” extravaganza. That to me is a clear sign that the planets are in the proper alignment for an 11 Things post dedicated to SRSLY, slow cooking, and general kitchen tips to make dinner (and breakfast and lunch) easy, breezy, beautiful…oh, wait, that’s the wrong commercial. SRSLY slices, dices, and makes Julianne fr…no, that’s not right either.

It’s all about time, folks, of which we all have precious little. Get ready to break out those tennis shoes and run out of the kitchen with these…

11 Things You Can Do to Make Cooking SRSLY Easy

1. The simple adaptability of the SRSLY method allows you to take virtually any slow cooker recipe and prep it the easy way. Take our idea and run with it! Check out Cooking Cache, RecipeZaar, and numerous blogs about slow cooking for ideas.

2. Do yourself a favor and plan ahead. I know, for example, that this weekend we’ll be prepping sweet and sour shin kickers, WTFBBQ, a new citrus and apple pork recipe, beef bourguignon, chili, lasagna, and macaroni and cheese. (The last two aren’t slow cooker recipes, but they are household favorites.) I know how many zip-top bags to have out, how many mushrooms to chop, and how much time we need. Because of the planning I’ve done, I expect that our prep (which will take about 2 hours) will be done before we head off to a picnic on Saturday afternoon.

3. While you’re doing all that planning, keep an eye on quantities and purposely create leftovers. Not only are they great for lunches, individual serving-sized quantities can be frozen and kept on hand for those nights when nobody wants to cook. (We all have them, and leftover stew is much better than a quart of ice cream.)

4. Your family and friends will appreciate the calm, zen-like state you achieve with the by-product of SRSLY, slow cooker aromatherapy. The only thing better than coming home to the smell of dinner wafting through your house is knowing that it’s real food, that it cooked itself while you were out, and that it requires minimal cleanup. That combination is enough to soothe even the most savage beast.

5. While we’re on the subject of pleasant aromas, I highly recommend that you familiarize yourself with your spice cabinet.  Knowing what spices taste like, what effect they have on certain dishes, and what you have hidden behind that 15-year-old tin of Old Bay are the key to making good dishes spectacular.  Find a dish that you make regularly, and make a minor tweak to the spices each time you make it, until eventually you get a “wow!” reaction.  It may become your signature dish.

6.  Another tool to add to your kitchen arsenal is a lack of fear.  It is OK to experiment and try new things, even if you screw up.  Some of our more interesting accidental creations have been hot dog and pea risotto, ramen latkes, and lasagna-free lasagna, which is what we had for dinner tonight.

To make lasagna-free lasagna, boil up whatever pasta you have handy.  (We used macaroni.)  In a microwave-safe bowl, combine 4 parts ricotta cheese, 2 parts shredded mozarella, and 1 part grated parmesan.  Season with your choice of spices (we prefer garlic, onion, basil, and oregano) and stir in 2 parts tomato sauce.  Mix well and microwave on 50% power for 10 minutes.  Serve over pasta.  Quick, easy, delish, and a complete gamble on our part.

7. Take that lack of fear and use it to bend your mind around the outside of a cubical container (think outside the box).  I love lasagna (can you tell?), but I hate boiling noodles just to prep a casserole.  Long before pasta companies started making special “no-boil” lasagna, I was making my own raw lasagna.  To this day, I make it this way, and I can’t believe anyone pays extra for those silly pleated noodles.

To make raw lasagna,  grease a 13×9″ pan.  Make 3 cups of your favorite lasagna filling (I use eggs, ricotta, parm, mozzarella, and spices) and set aside.  Pour 1 cup of your preferred tomato sauce into the bottom of the pan.  Layer raw (traditional) lasagna noodles on top of the sauce, breaking noodles if necessary to cover the bottom of the pan.  Do not overlap.  Top with 1 cup sauce.  Add a cup of your cheese filling, spreading evenly over the noodles.  Top with 1 cup sauce, noodles, 1 cup sauce, 1 cup cheese, 1 cup sauce, noodles, 1 cup sauce, 1 cup cheese, noodles, and finish with 1 1/2 cups sauce.  Cover tightly with foil and rest overnight in the refrigerator.  Bake for 1 hour at 350 degrees.  Remove foil and top with shredded mozzarella cheese; return to oven for an additional 20 minutes or until cheese is GBD.  This recipe uses a bit more sauce than traditional lasagna, but it’s necessary because that’s where the noodles get their water to cook.  The result is a tight, dense lasagna that holds together very well.

8. Learn which foods are worth your time, and which aren’t.  For example, I always, always, always buy frozen pre-chopped onions.  It’s more expensive than cutting them myself, but cutting onions is such as hassle that it’s worth the extra money to me.  Instead of dragging out a cutting board, pausing to clear my eyes, and cursing the fact that I don’t even like onions, I just open a bag and dump it into another bag.  Easy peasy.  I also adore raw broccoli, and I’ve found the the price per pound at our local grocer is lower on pre-cut florets than it is on whole heads of broccoli, once you figure in the loss to stems.  (I’ll eat chopped, peeled stems steamed, but not raw.)  As my mom likes to say, “keep your eyes peeled.”

9. Impress your friends!  My co-workers are constantly amazed at the yumminess I bring to work every day.  They don’t understand how I have the time to cook *and* work *and* be a student.  I’ve tried explaining, but they don’t seem to grasp the wonders of slow cooking.  They remain, however, completely jealous of my goodies.  I just smile and eat my shortribs.

10. Use the gift of time!  Since we started SRSLY, I estimate that we’ve gained about 8 hours every week that was lost to cooking and cleaning up after dinner.  That’s enough time to take a class at your local community college, start a new hobby, play with your kids, start meditating, start exercising, hit the local library, or just sit on your ass and contemplate the crockery.  It doesn’t matter what you do — it matters that you can.

11. Become an Internet superstar.  Well, not quite.  Maybe a fleck of dust in the ring of one of the Internet’s moons?  We’re always experimenting with new SRSLY recipes, but we can only do so much before we run out of ideas.  Plus, we can only eat the same 20-dinner rotation for so long before it gets tiring and we head for the Hot Pockets section of the frozen foods aisle.

So, dear readers, we implore you: send us your SRSLY/slow cooker recipes, and save us from crock pot monotony!  We’ll credit you, link back to your blog or website, and praise your name when we ladle your dish out of our cooker.   (Quality of praise not guaranteed.)  Submit your recipes here, or email interact at living behind the curve dot com.

Also, if you have any questions about SRSLY, or have any suggestions of what we can add to the FAQ, we’d love to hear from you.

~~

I’ll be back on Monday with a freezer full of SRSLY goodness and part 2 of my post on health insurance and my plans to cash out my 401(k).

Enjoy your weekend!

Every Wednesday is Domestic Science day at Living Behind the Curve.

For some unknown reason, many people see beef bourguignon as a mysterious, complicated, unattainable dish, placing it firmly alongside coq au vin in the “things you only eat in restaurants” category. Maybe it’s the name that’s intimidating; if so, call it beef burgundy and get on with life. This wine-based beef stew is excellent fodder your your slow cooker, and the acidity of the wine plus the slow cooking time means that you can safely use a nice cheap cut of meat. We like this over rice or egg noodles, with a healthy dollop of sour cream on top.

Slow Cooked Beef Bourguignon

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. bacon, cooked and chopped
• 3 lb. beef roast
• 375 ml. (1/2 bottle) red wine
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 lb. celery, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 shallots, diced
• 1 bay leaf
• salt and pepper to taste

Standard Slow Cooker Method:
Combine all ingredients in a slow cooker on low and cook for 4-5 hours.

SRSLY Method:
Combine all ingredients in a gallon-sized ziptop bag and freeze.  When ready to cook, cut from bag and place directly in crock pot, frozen.  Cook at low heat for 6-8 hours.

Every Wednesday is Domestic Science day at Living Behind the Curve.

This is Mer’s favorite SRSLY recipe, and occupies our slow cooker as often as twice a week. This has a rather substantial yield: we usually get one night’s dinner, the next day’s lunch, and additional leftovers out of one batch.

The yams offer a nice sweetness to balance out the heat of the curry, and it’s a surprisingly light meal, considering the density of the ingredients. We serve it over basmati rice, but it is equally good over cous cous or even noodles. If the heat bothers you, scale back on the curry powder or top the dish with sour cream or plain yogurt for a nice refreshing twist.

Curried Chicken with Yams

Ingredients:

• 2 pounds chicken legs and thighs, skin on, or 1 1/2 pounds boneless skinless chicken, cut into strips
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 tablespoon minced ginger
• 1/3 cup curry powder*
• 2 bay leaves
• 4 cups chicken stock
• 3 yams, cut into 1″ cubes

Slow Cooker Method
Combine all ingredients and simmer on low for 4-6 hours.

Stove-top Method
Sautee onion, garlic, and ginger in about a tablespoon of butter or oil until fragrant.  Stir in spices.  Add chicken and lightly brown on both sides.  Add yams and pour chicken stock over pot contents.  Cover and simmer over medium heat for 2-3 hours, or until chicken is cooked through.

SRSLY Method
Combine all ingredients in a gallon-sized zip-top bag and freeze.  When ready to cook, place frozen contents in slow cooker and cook on low heat for 8-10 hours.

*I use sweet, mild curry powder, usually a homemade concoction, for this recipe, and 1/3 cup is just right for our houshold tastebuds. I wouldn’t recommend using a hot blend in this amount (unless you’re into that sort of thing). Use your own preferences and tastes as a guide, and experiment to find your best blend.