Crock Pot Challenge Meal #9: Greek Chicken

When I was typing the title of this post I actually wrote "Green Failure" first then I realized what I typed.  That should give you an idea how Meal #9 went.

Today was the first time cooking a full chicken in the crock pot.  I was following a recipe from Tone It Up! Blog, click here to see all of their crock pot recipes.  The one I wanted to try was the Greek Chicken recipe, second on their list.

The failure could be 100% my fault. I missed two words in the ingredient list - "skin removed".  When I put the whole chicken in the crock pot the skin was still on the bird.  Here is how our meal looked when we got home.

Not too appetizing, but I still wanted to give it a shot.  It's a whole bird, that's a lot of meat and money to give up without trying it.  Luckily, the skin came right off the meat and the mead fell right off the bone.  We served with Quinoa and sat down for dinner.  Stephen liked it, even said it was a Keeper, but we disagree.  I thought the meat was far too dry.  Also, there wasn't much of a "Greek" flavor to it at all.  Is it called Greek Chicken because there is Greek yogurt in it?  Well, you don't taste it or much of anything else.

I won't be making this meal again.  Stephen made a good point, I didn't like this chicken because all of the chicken he makes is the best I've ever had.  He's probably right.  We have another whole chicken in the freezer, Stephen is going to cook it his way this weekend and I'm sure it will blow mine away.

I'm traveling tomorrow and I won't be home until after 8pm.  We have a ton of Buffalo Chicken left over so instead of me trying to put something together before I run out the door in the morning to catch a plane, we're just going to go with left overs tomorrow night and we'll pick back up the following day.

Crock Pot Challenge Meal #4: Stuffed Green Peppers

It was bound to happen.  Today was the day.  We found a bad recipe.  The house smelled delicious when we walked in the house from work, we took the dogs outside to potty, topped the peppers with cheese and dug into our dinner.

Mixing the stuffing before filling the peppers

On a scale of 1-10 Stephen gave these a 7, I think that's generous.  I give them a 5.  I could do without the entire green pepper.  You can't give something more than 50% when the main part of the dish is gross.

Stuffed and ready to go

The recipe called for 9-11 hours in the crock pot on low which is perfect for our long days at the office.  I think this was about 2 hours too long.  The green peppers were totally soggy and flavorless.  We ended up eating the stuffing and not the peppers.

The recipe called for a cup of cooked rice, 2 lbs of ground beef (I used 1.5 lbs) two whipped eggs, half a cup each of milk and ketchup.  I think it would be better with uncooked quinoa.  Maybe we'll try that next time we attempt a similar recipe.

Pepper #1 out of the crock pot - success

The peppers that ended up touching the sides of the slow cooker were burnt and tasteless.  The rice was far too over cooked and the meat left a giant pool of grease at the bottom of the crock pot. 

Not all of the peppers could be removed in one piece... yum?

Needless to say, this recipe didn't make the Keeper list and it's not a recipe we'd ever feed to our friends.  I'm not even going to tell you the full recipe, it's not worth it.  

In better news, we have M&Ms that we can snack on for the rest of the night.  You win some, you lose some.  Does anyone out there have a Stuffed Green Pepper recipe that works in the crock pot?