Revenge of the Comments Section: Fake Rotisserie and Taco Filling

These two came from the following website's group discussion:

http://www.workitmom.com/groups/discussion/1799

Fake Rotisserie

I found this because a month ago I bought a couple whole chickens dirt cheap at Fresh & Easy but never figured out what to do with them. The expiration was already up on them so I needed something fast. The rotisserie recipe I found on this site may well be the easiest I've ever done. Here's what I did:

I took my frozen chicken and thawed it out under some hot water. Then I pulled its legs apart and stuffed the inside with a sliced lemon. After that I rubbed it with Lowry's Seasoned Salt. Preparation: DONE.

I took some foiled and crumbled up around five foil balls and placed them at the bottom of my slow cooker. I took my chicken, flipped it upside down on the balls, and let it cook for around 8 hours.

It was OK. Some of it had a very lemony taste, but the seasoned salt did little for it and it seemed to need even more salt than I put on it. I think the biggest issue may have been that when I rubbed the salt on it the coating fell off during the cooking, and for some reason it didn't have much of a chance to go into the meat. This may have been helped if I put some of this salt inside the chicken along with the lemons, but who knows.

Because of how tender the chicken was (it was falling apart as we tried to lift it out of the cooker) my girlfriend de-boned it and we had burritos with the chicken and some cilantro. It was good, but I'm not sure how eager I am to do this one again.

I have no pictures of this because it was really a spur-of-the-moment thing and I forgot to do it. Oops!

Chicken Taco Filling

Another easy one that can be done with shit your probably already have in your cabinet. Just take a couple chicken breasts (I used three because the ones I bought were fairly small), a can of chicken broth, and some taco seasoning, and dump them all into the slow cooker and cook for six hours. It's cooking right now as I type this, so I have no idea how well it's going to turn out. I'll probably be eating this alone tonight because I actually like the cheap crunchy taco shells and my girlfriend hates them. Plus she's going out with some friends tonight to eat professionally made tacos, so this is a solo act.

Six hours later I forgot to shred the meat, so I ripped it up as much as I could with two forks and let it sit for another half hour. When I was finished I made two tacos with those yellow store shells. They turned out delicious. Because of drowning in the broth, they were sloppy as well, but after eating the second one I kept craving more. This is a very simple and very delicious recipe that I can wholeheartedly recommend.

BBQ Chicken Sandwiches UPDATE

It's been three days since making this dish, so here are a few updates.

As predicted, this is lasting us pretty well. I've been able to eat a couple BBQ sandwiches for lunch and dinner every day since making this, and there's still a decent amount left. We'll probably have to chuck the rest after today.

Those little slider buns we used do not work for this, unless you want soggy-ass sandwiches and fall apart in your hands before you can take a bite. The following day we picked up some bolillo rolls from a local bakery and those have worked beautifully. In fact, I would recommend using these rolls instead, since they remain hard enough on the outside to handle, yet the inside soaks up a good amount of the juice.

Finally, one unfortunate reaction that I've had with this recipe is that it not only leaves a strong aftertaste in your mouth hours after eating them (and even after brushing your teeth), but it also gives you relationship-ruining gas. Seriously, I have no had gas this bad for about a year, and I suspect it may have to do with the combination of mustard and onions. Great for flavor, not so great for those around you.

BBQ Chicken Sandwiches from a Comments Section

To start off, I'm going to talk about a BBQ chicken sandwich recipe that I found in the comments section here:

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2009/01/30/the-frugal-magic-of-the-five-ingredient-crock-pot-meal/


I'm going to start off by talking about my slow cooker. The slow cooker is an essential tool for people who can't cook shit and are lazy as hell. All you do is just dump a bunch of ingredients into your cooker, cover it up, turn the dial to "low" or "high," then go watch a movie, go for a walk, whatever. Depending on the cook time, you can go to work and come back home to a fully-cooked meal that you just scoop out and start munching. It's so insanely easy to use that I feel like a douche for not knowing about it beforehand.

Anyhow, today I'm working on my fourth slow cooker recipe. The first one I ever did was a rather ambitious Korean shredded beef taco recipe, which resulted in the best meal I've ever made. When I make it again I'll talk about it in detail. My next dish was pot roast that came out tasting like a soggy, beef-flavored rice cake. My last one was a five ingredient chili recipe (taken from the above link) which came out really good. All of these, if and when I make them again with adjustments, I'll describe. Today, I'm working on something from the comment section.

User submitted recipes are kind of risky, since anyone can just throw some bullshit up there and there's not much quality control. This one sounded pretty good though, so I said "fuck it." Plus I already had most of the ingredients, so I didn't have to do much store hopping either:

Needed:

2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs or breasts. I'm a breast man, so I bought some chicken breast "tenders", which I hope will make them easier to shred.
1 can of cola. I used Coke because it was available and I'm half Mexican.
1 large onion, sliced thin. I diced mine.
1.5 cups ketchup. I ran out before I had enough for a full cup, so I had to drive to the store to get more.
1/2 cup mustard.

I dumped diced onions, the semi-frozen chicken breast strips, and can of Coke in before I had to drive to the store and get more ketchup. I got back and added the rest, covered the lid, and put it on "low." In about an hour that BBQ smell started filling the house, and it was pretty sharp. I opened the lid to peek in, and the sauces looked disgusting, but it smelled decent. About three hours in or so I decided to stir it all up and see how the chicken was cooking. I pried apart some pieces that were still stuck together (they were frozen when I dumped them in) and made sure they stayed nice and submerged. Also, time to get the buns out. This I guess would be a "sixth" ingredient.

Half an hour to go now. I just opened up the lid and poked the chicken with a fork. It still has that somewhat rubbery chicken breast feel, so I'm wondering how tender these things are supposed to be after cooking. When I've done beef the meat just easily shredded, so I don't know what to expect with chicken breasts. I may need to "help" the meat along if they're still somewhat tough when the cooking time's over by slicing some of the breasts down the middle and letting the hot juices seep into the center of the slits. Of course, since I got this recipe from the comments section, I have no idea what else I'm supposed to do. All I know is that I'm supposed to throw all this shit in the pot together, cook it for around 8 hours, and that they're supposed to be "great on buns!"

Time's up. The breasts were fairly tender, but I used a fork to cut as many of them in half as I can. I'm leaving them in for another hour or so to see if I can get these shits softer.

DONE. I brought out some small potato sesame buns to serve them on. Surprisingly, for a five-ingredient meal, this came out really good. The meat was tender, even though I did some additional shredding to fit the small-sized buns that I was using. They had a sweet taste and the meat was delicious. The sauce was pretty decent as well. It wasn't a thick sauce, but considering that it's mainly a sauce to soak the meat in for flavor, I was fine with that. The only downside came from the buns, which got damn soggy and hard to hold after slopping the meat on top of them. For a future meal I could either make a taco or burrito with this meat, or get firmer buns for the sandwich.

Overall, this was delicious and I'd definitely make it again. Even with white meat, it was juicy and good.

Preparation: Easy as hell.
Cook time: About 9 hours for maximum tenderness, but you'd make the best judge.
Ingredients: Five. Six if you want to count the buns.

I Don't Know How to Cook

Seriously. I've made some straight-up bullshit food in my life. Hell, one time I made something called "No Bowl Top Ramen" where I put a ramen brick in the micro covered with a slice of cheddar cheese and the flavor powder. I almost puked when I tried eating this monstrosity and I eventually tried giving it to my cats, who had more sense than to eat this fucking thing. That's right, animals that eat disease-ridden rodents wouldn't even give my food a courtesy lick.

Now I'm 32, living with my beautiful fiance, and wanting to contribute to what we eat. I've made a few things before when I'm starting to ease into competence, so I decided to chronicle some of my journeys in food here on this blog. I'll be giving links to where I find these recipes, and also say how easy they are to prepare. I'm looking all over for the good stuff and welcome any recommendations, but the main thing here is that I'm looking for stuff that's cheap and easy. The fewer ingredients needed, and the less preparation required, the better.

I'll try to go in chronological order and list when I make things, but I may throw in some memories of dishes I've made before. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, basically.

Let's dive in!