TurboFire Chicken Cacciatore

People seem to love slow cooker meals.  I do too.  Relatively little prep work, easy clean up - especially if your slow cooker has a removable insert that you can put in the dishwasher - and your house smells great all day.

Here's a great, healthy chicken cacciatore recipe from the TurboFire cookbook that went over well with my family.  I did some adjustments to meet my taste preferences from the original recipe. Here's what I did.

Chicken Wing Dip

There are two really good reasons why you should try making this chicken wing dip, if you never have before.

Reason #1 - Football
Reason #2 - Holiday Parties

Somewhere between those two occurrences, you will discover how awesome this chicken wing dip is, will be asked to make it in copious amounts for every gathering, and even those copious amounts will prove inadequate to handle its life span of 2.76 seconds.

I wish I could take credit for creating this recipe, but I can't.  It's the good ol' Frank's RedHot Buffalo Chicken Wing Dip recipe.  Probably the only thing I sometimes do differently is use an alternate hot sauce, based on availability at the store, and I generally have to double or triple the amount because - as I mentioned - I'm often asked to make "vats" of this stuff.

I'm not kidding on the "vats" thing.

There are two ways to make this chicken wing dip. You can bake it, or you can use a slow cooker.  I'll give you directions for both.

Slow Cooker Chicken and Black Bean Chili

Normally, people think of slow cookers as an easy way to create warm, delicious meals in the middle of winter.  There's nothing quite like the smell of hearty beef stew or chicken soup filling your house on a cold winter day, and knowing you'll get to dig in after those luscious flavors have simmered for up to ten hours.

So why am I blogging about a slow cooker recipe in June?

Well, just as slow cookers are life-and-dinner-savers in the wintertime, they are great for summer as well.  Think about it for a minute - sometimes you just don't want to grill (hold off on the horrified gasps for a minute, friends), but you want a hearty meal.  Now where I live, we don't usually get super hot summer days until, oh, end of July (this past week's heat wave notwithstanding).  So even though my dear husband likes to fire up the grill, I usually have no qualms about stirring something up on the stove or baking in the oven.

But slow cookers are great for summer.  Minimal fuss, you're not heating up a single element on your stove top, and they don't add much heat to your kitchen.  Do I recommend them for a 95+ degree day?  Not unless you have central air.  (Which I now have, and I'm looking forward to a summer of baking and canning in cool, air-conditioned comfort.)  On the hottest of hot days, a spinach and tomato salad alongside a couple hot dogs is as fancy as we'll get around here.

But I'm digressing terribly.

Chili is definitely a winter food.  But thanks to your slow cooker, you can enjoy it in the summer with minimal fuss and discomfort.  This particular chili recipe has the added bonus of being low calorie and low fat, thanks to the use of boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

And your hands-on time is maybe ten minutes, tops, depending on your dexterity with two forks.

This recipe doesn't have to be made in a slow cooker.  You can make it on the stove as well.  Use a large (three to four quart) pot, and simmer for about a half hour before shredding the chicken.

Chicken Marbella

I recently tried out a slow cooker recipe I snagged out of Woman's Day for chicken marbella.  It was really easy and an interesting combination of flavors.  I followed the recipe pretty closely, though I did make a couple minor adjustments and discovered a couple things I'd do the next time I make it.

I apologize for some of the lower quality photos.  The light in my kitchen was a little off the day I made this.