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.
