Adventures in Slow Cooking, Part II: Cream-of-Mushroom Chicken With Broccoli

Gentle reader, for my second-ever foray into slow-cooker cooking, I had the urge to go old-school-Americana with that classic creamy combo of chicken and Campbell’s canned cream of mushroom soup. (I have a perverse taste for this, as evidenced by the Company Chicken recipe.) I checked out a few recipes online, and they were all pretty similar—as Andy Warhol could’ve told you, Campbell’s soup cans do not really lend themselves to variation. I settled on a pretty simple take on it. You just dump all of the following into the cooker:

Roasted Broccoli With Panko and Parmesan

Yay for Memorial Day weekend, the start of the summer season!

Now, everyone knows that if you go out in the sun at the start of the summer season, you’ve got to build up your sun tolerance and gradually establish a base tan—if you go from an entire winter indoors to an entire day in the sun, you will get badly burned. Well, gentle reader, this fail happened to me over Memorial Day weekend, except with meat. Basically, I got carried away by grilled-meat excitement at the start of BBQ season (including one of Miss Alyce’s lovely rooftop affairs) and did not consume a single other food group (unless you count beer) for two days. It turns out that’s a bit much even for a carnivore like me. This is why I, of all people, came to prepare roasted broccoli as a one-dish meal.

I brought home a nice bunch of broccoli purchased from my new boyfriend Mr. Melon, and preheated the oven to 425°. (This would be the silver lining of the temperature vacillating 20 degrees every other day lately—it most certainly doesn’t feel like the start of summer right now.) I trimmed the bottoms off 4 of the broccoli stems, peeled the fibrous outer layer of skin off the stalks, and sliced each into quarters.

Curried Brassica (what's in my fridge)

hi folks!

I had a crazy day at work today, and what kept me going was thinking about what I would make for dinner. For a while I've been wanting to thank all of you for reading here- writing this blog, thinking about food, cooking, and especially posting here, has made me more experimental, more willing to try throwing things together. By reading what my awesome co-blogger Kitty is working on, and cooking for you guys, I am getting better at combining ingredients to make flavors, and I really hope all of you have been finding the posts helpful in your kitchens. or at least finding them to be entertaining.

So I had a long day, and was looking forward to coming home to watch some JV-squad pre-playoffs basketball (Celtics beat the Heat again!) and sitting on my couch. I have been traveling a fair amount, and I had some things in my fridge that I wanted to use up, but was also (conveniently) craving. Namely, cauliflower. I came home with an idea about some crispy spicy cauliflower. I was picturing it kind of pan fried and browned. I was excited about this mental picture. I did not end up executing this mental picture. Instead, I ended up with a curry-sauced cauliflower and broccoli over orzo. What? How? Want to retrace my steps with me? I know you do.