Chicken and rice - with homemade Rice-A-Roni
Prep Time: 20 minutes
Cook Time: 4 1/2 hours
Servings: 4
Difficulty: Easy
Ingredients:
2 pounds chicken, cubed
1 can cream of chicken soup
4 1/4 cup water
4 1/4 tsp chicken bouillon
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp Italian seasoning
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 lb. spaghetti, angel hair or vermicelli pasta, broken into small pieces
1 cup rice
4 tbs butter (1/2 stick)
Directions:
Spray crockpot with cooking spray, then preheat while you prepare the chicken.
Cut chicken into small cubes, then place in crock pot.
Add soup, water, bouillon, and spices, then stir
Cover and cook on high for 4 hours (or on low for 7 hours).
When the time’s up add pasta, rice, and butter, stirring well. Turn crockpot to low (if needed) then cook an additional 20 to 30 minutes until rice is done, stirring several times.
I usually actually get a little over 2 pounds of chicken, maybe 2 1/4 pounds. I usually end up trimming a bit off so I like to start with some extra. Also, although you can get the chicken pre-cubed it’s a lot less expensive to get whole boneless breasts. It takes more time to prepare it but it will definitely save you some money. I said the prep time is only 5 minutes but that sort of assumes you cut up the chicken in advance. If you buy large packages of chicken you can slice it up and then freeze it, then just put it in the fridge the day before you’re going to cook it so it has time to defrost. I usually try to put the chicken chunks in a freezer bag in a single layer and not packed tightly. I also move the pieces around every now and then as they freeze to keep them separated rather than having them end up in a huge frozen clump. It’s actually quite possible to just put the frozen pieces straight in the crockpot but you might have to adjust the cooking time. I’ve not actually tried that yet so I can’t personally testify as to how it might change things.
So I’ve made this a bunch of times as it’s easy and darn good. As a bonus it also freezes pretty well. Also, I find I almost always need 30 minutes for the rice to fully cook, although of course your mileage may vary. And I usually take out the butter in advance so it can soften as well. I used to make it with store-bought Rice-a-Roni® but it’s hardly any more difficult making it from scratch. And actually, I now have a simple cream of chicken soup recipe so next time I’m going to go one step deeper into “from scratch.”
However. (For some reason, there always seems to be a however in these things. Or perhaps it’s just me, which is probably much more likely.) However, in an effort to pre-make things as much as possible, I decided to measure out the rice and the pasta into ziplocs so I could just pour them into the crockpot at the appropriate time without having to measure things in the heat of the moment. Great idea! However (darn it, there it is again!) it’s really surprisingly hard to break pasta. Well, it’s not that it’s hard to do but it turns out that spaghetti is sharp and pointy and hurts your poor little fingers after a time. Actually, after a rather short time, in fact. Nope, not me, I’m never going to do that again. I’m way too smart for that, yessir.
So I figured I’d get a mortar and pestle. Yeah, I’ve seen them in countless movies, it’ll be great. Except I couldn’t seem to find them any bigger than a baseball, for spices apparently. I just assumed they’d be volleyball sized, so I could put spaghetti in and bust it up good with the pestle. Or perhaps the mortar. Hard to keep them straight. Maybe I need to go to a good restaurant supply place on the Bowery, or perhaps spend multiple hundreds of dollars on a fine Vermont granite one that I happened to find somewhere online that was of sufficient size. But in the meantime, I had yet another brilliant idea! Yup, I figured instead of using my dainty little fingers to break the pasta I’d be super-smart and use two nested mixing bowls. Sheer genius! Except, uh, have you ever tried to do that? I don’t think you have, and in fact neither had I. Turns out it works great. Except for the part where the broken (and sharp!) pasta goes flying all over the place. It seems that breaking spaghetti between two slightly different size stainless steel mixing bowls unleashes the heretofore unknown-to-science pasta spring force. Apparently coiled within each strand of uncooked spaghetti is a microscopic spring of savage power. Who knew?!? Not only did the now-short spaghetti fragments fly all over my kitchen but there were a few that perversely headed straight for my eyeballs. Just like my mom had always warned me about! It was the most hazardous meal I’ve prepared in a good long while.
I have, however, solved the problem in the traditional American way. With money. It seems there’s a thing called fideo, which in the store I thought was a made-up fake pasta name but it turns out it’s Spanish for noodle. I had no idea, but it’s basically the same broken up spaghetti for which I’d ruined my poor fingers the first time and with which I'd splattered my kitchen the second time, all for a modest sum of US$1.69 for a pound of the wondrous stuff. And in fact, unbeknownst to me it was actually on sale for $1.25. Even better!
So I close this sad-yet-happily-concluded tale with some sage advice that I’m going to falsely claim was first said by Ben Franklin: you don’t need to bust up your own spaghetti.
The end.
Cost for four meals, about $10.
Also, seriously Apple? Rice-A-Rona? Or perhaps even worse, Rice-A-Ron?
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