Chicken Cacciatore
Let's continue on these food thoughts for just a bit longer. A couple of weeks ago we had the annual meeting of the board of directors of Ars Hermeneutica, and I made dinner for everyone. We had a casual sort of meal: slow-cooker chicken cacciatore, served with angel-hair pasta, a big Italian style green salad*, a Waldorf salad because Waldorf salad is always good, and for dessert I made a no-sugar-added lemon mousse with raspberry puree. Everything was delicious! I'm always happy when dishes come out nicely. Right now it's the chicken recipe that I want to talk about; I'll try to remember to share the recipe for the lemon mousse later.
This recipe for the slow cooker, a large-capacity one, gets high marks for simplicity and taste. It gets thrown together with virtually no fuss and the results are remarkably good. I like the idea of chicken but how often does it come out perfectly cooked, moist and tender, like it did with this recipe? We had nearly half the dish left over, but that was readily dealt with: dump the pasta into the cacciatore, stir it up, and it's a casserole ready to go from refrigerator to oven for another meal.
This recipe comes, with only minor modifications, from Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann, Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook (Boston, Massachusetts : The Harvard Common Press, 2005), p. 276.
Slow-Cooker Chicken Cacciatore
- One jar tomato-basil spaghetti sauce (mine was 18-ounce)
- 1 medium yellow onion, cut in half and sliced into half moons
- 1 to 3 cloves of garlic, minced
- 1 medium green bell pepper, seeded and cut into 1-inch chunks
- 8 chicken thighs
- 6 ounces fresh mushrooms, quartered
- Layer half the tomato sauce and all the onion, garlic, bell pepper, and chicken in the slow cooker. Sprinkle the mushrooms on top and cover with the remaining tomato sauce.
- Cover and cook until the chicken is tender and cooked through, 2.5 to 3 hours on HIGH, or 6 to 7 hours on LOW. The chicken will add some of its own juices to the sauce.
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* I say Italian style because it was inspired by the salads we enjoyed so much in Rome at l'Ensalata Ricca. In a big bowl I put a pound of mixed greens and a pound of arugula — arugula gives it a characteristic flavor. I dressed that with lots of olive oil and only a splash of red-wine vinegar, tossed it, then decorated the top with sliced roma tomatoes, some black olives, and a sliced, very ripe pear, over which I sprinkled a handful of cooked (canned) corn. There's no need to toss again; arrange the additions nicely on top of the dressed greens and then let serving take care of mixing and moistening everything as necessary.