More slow cooked goodies

So late April/ early May is still feeling like February.  I’ve got my winter coat out again, the central heating cranked up and I’m still munching on things that I’ve made in the slow cooker which for me, is more of a gadget  I should be using in winter when it’s comfort food season, not the spring!  Nevertheless, I have discovered two new recipes from the book below, which cost £4.99 from Asda. It’s a pretty cute book and well worth investing in a copy if you’re a slow cooker fan and need some inspiration. 

My faves for this week have been the chicken with sundried tomatoes and olives and the red Thai curry with beef.  I have tweaked the recipes slightly and the chicken dish gets you about a weeks’ worth of freezeable lunches as well (Yes, I know freezeable isn’t a word, I just coined it! Any linguists out there will see it’s an example of derivational morphology and the good old adding a suffix at the end!)

Chicken with sundried tomatoes and olives with tuna pasta lunches:

Ingredients (serves 2):

2 chicken breasts

1tsp salt

½ tsp pepper

30g plain flour (gluten free is fine too)

1 onion, diced

3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

125ml dry white wine

2 tins (800g) of chopped tomatoes (plus an extra tin for the pasta lunch)

155g of stoned olives

75g sundried tomatoes

One 500g bag of whole wheat pasta (just cook as much as you need or if making the lunches, do the full bag)

1 tin of sweetcorn and one tin of tuna (drained) if making the pasta lunch

If you want to skip making the pasta lunches and make your chicken dish go further, use 4 chicken breast fillets instead.

Method:

1.        Place the chicken, flour, salt and pepper into a plastic freezer bag and give it all a good shake so that the chicken is evenly coated.

2.       Place the onion, garlic, wine, olives, tinned tomatoes and sundried tomatoes into the slow cooker.  Add your chicken, placing it under the mixture so that it doesn’t dry out during cooking.

3.       Cover and cook on low for 7-8 hours.  Serve with the pasta and some of the sauce.  And since there’s loads of this left, you can use it to make leftover lunches....

For the tuna pasta lunch:

1.        Throw your tuna, sweetcorn and remaining pasta into the slow cooker with the leftover sauce and give it all a stir. You could also chuck in any leftover olives and sundried tomatoes too- anything you fancy really!  If the dish is a little thick after adding all of your ingredients, mix in the extra tin of tomatoes to loosen the sauce.  Put into foil tins and freeze.

Red Thai curry with beef:

I’ve tweaked this recipe a little from the version in the book and use a full tin of coconut milk to keep the meat tender and thicken the sauce at the end using corn flour.  I’ve also cut out the sugar from the original recipe and use healthier sweet potatoes rather than white ones.

Ingredients:

75g of Thai red curry paste

One tin of coconut milk

1 tbsp Thai fish sauce (though think mine was Chinese?  So any fish sauce will do!)

75g smooth peanut butter

800g of diced beef (mine was from Aldi)

2 sweet potatoes, peeled and diced

125ml beef stock (1 stock cube will make plenty)

2 tablespoons of corn flour

Brown rice to serve

Method:

1.        Put the curry paste, coconut milk, fish sauce and peanut butter into the slow cooker and mix together.  Then add your potatoes, beef and stock, giving it all another good mix.

2.       Cover and cook on low for 8 hours.  About 30mins before the dish is ready, stir through the corn flour to thicken the sauce.

3.       Serve with brown rice and freeze any leftovers.

I didn’t take a photo of the finished dish in the slow cooker, because it doesn’t look particularly good on camera!  It is delicious though, so don’t be put off by its diarrhoea-like appearance (I’m really selling this recipe to you, aren’t I?!)

In other news this week, I also did a check of my BMI on the NHS Direct website.  It took about 30 seconds (as long as you have your weight and height info) and is really handy  to check where you are on the scale.  I was in the middle of healthy weight, which, I think, is the perfect place to be and must mean that I'm eating well and moving around enough too!

Happy, healthy eating!