Chicken Marinara

It interesting that a few years ago during the H1N1 outbreak, the sale meat was pork.  By about this time then I was scrambling to find all the pork recipes I could.  This year it seems like deja vu except the meat is chicken.  There have been some rather good sales recently so we have been taking advantage of them but in moderation as we need to use up a fair amount in our freezers in order to be ready for out half of cow this year.

After the disappointing slow cooker whole chicken I decided to try cooking a whole chicken in the slow cooker using the remaining fresh whole chicken.  I placed the chicken in the slow cooker with 8 oz of fresh whole mushrooms and four 1 - inch thick cabbage wedges.  Then I poured a 1 - L jar home canned marinara sauce over the chicken and set the slow cooker to high for 4 hours.

We were running a bit late that night so the slow cooker automatically switched to the warm setting.  This is a nice feature that keeps the dish hot but not to the point of it being over cooked.   The house smelled wonderful when we walked in the door to an almost fully cooked meal!  I'm starting to like this slow cooker.

Oh my!  This was a delightful meal that was ever so easy to make and on the frugal side.  I served the chicken marinara with a bit of the sauce ladled over the chicken.  Sides were sweet peas, buttered egg noodles and the mushroom cabbage mixture.  The chicken was melt in your mouth tender with a lot of flavour.  The marinara sauce gave a nice flavour not only to the chicken but also the mushrooms and cabbage.  Cabbage is one low cost, nutritious vegetable I have been trying to work more of into our meals.   I didn't thicken the sauce although it could easily have been thickened with a little corn starch slurry.  

What struck me about this meal was in it's simplicity there was an abundance of beautiful, bright flavours.  We ate half of the chicken for dinner with the other half leftover for the following day's lunch and popped the remainder into a quick homemade soup.  This will be one meal I will be duplicating again!