Cooking Ideas--Crock Pots and recipe for Creamy Chicken a la Crock Pot

I love to cook in the crock pot. I especially love that it takes minimal effort and that I can walk in the door after work and VOILA! Dinner is done!

As I was perusing the web, I found this website about this woman who cooked with a crock pot every day for a year....wow, that is a lot! She has even been on the Rachel Ray show and is now coming out with a cook book. The link to her blog is http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/ and you will find a world of 365 crock pot recipes to try! I will also try to post a few of my favorites as well. I have a crock pot cook book that is pretty good however it has like 10 recipes for chili and 8 recipes for vegetable stew, etc...its kind of a conglomeration of recipes that people sent in and sometimes you have a few too many choices...like which vegetable stew recipe do you follow...and actually, my recipe for vegetable stew is this...throw every vegetable you have in the fridge and pantry in the pot and add some meat! (How is that for fancy?) Add some broth of some sort and let it stew and meld and become one...yummm!

One of my favorite recipes in the crock pot is to just take chicken breasts and cream of mushroom soup and pour it over it and add a can or so of water. Let it cook the normal 6-8 hours and the last 20-30 minutes you add a block of cream cheese and some sour cream...it becomes this wonderful chicken with this cream sauce that you want to lick the sides of the bows for...not that I have EVER done that. I love that Creamy Chicken! (for 4 people I would use 4-6 chicken breasts and 2 cans of cream of mushroom...cream of chicken works as well and so does the fancy versions of creamy soups like the cream of roasted chicken and garlic mushrooms...or whatever.)

If you have never been a crock potter or do not have one, I suggest you go to the local discount store and buy you a good but cheap one. I think I got one for $14 once and it worked great! The best thing is coming home to a meal that is warm and ready to go when you walk in that door, just pull up a plate and eat! It also doesn't heat up the whole house if you live in a warmer climate and that is a nice bonus to us Texans when it 102 degrees in July with the heat index of 1 gazillion.