Name: Slow Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 8 h 20 min
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients: one 2.5-3 pound corned beef; 8-12 red potatoes, quartered; 1/2-3/4 head cabbage, thinly sliced/shredded; 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted; salt

Slow Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage

March 13, 2016

Slow Cooker corned beef and cabbage is a great way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day…but it’s just as good any day of the year!

I generally make corned beef and cabbage one time a year-some time around St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t know why I only make it then; we both love corned beef and cabbage, but I guess since it’s on sale in March that’s when I think about it. At any rate, with it just being two of us in the house, we can stretch a single corned beef brisket for at least three and sometimes even four meals. Dishes like that are glorious. I really don’t understand people who never eat leftovers. Sure, there are some foods that are pretty gross the next day….but most foods are even better and minimal cooking, hello?!?!?!?! I like to repurpose my leftovers, so I have a couple of repurposed corned beef recipes to share with you over the next week.

Anyway, enough about leftovers. Let’s talk about corned beef. First off, let me clear something up. Corned beef is always brisket but brisket is not always corned beef. I have run into several people who, when I start talking about brisket, say, “I don’t like brisket!” to which I say, “WHO DOESN’T LIKE BRISKET???” and invariably they make a comment about corned beef. Then I have to set them straight. Brisket is a cut of beef. Corned beef is brisket that has been “corned”, which is a form of curing. The more you know….

Really, though, I should follow with, “WHO DOESN’T LIKE CORNED BEEF?” I really don’t get it. My favorite deli sandwiches usually involved corned beef or pastrami (which is peppered corned beef). I mean, it’s salty and meaty and GAH. Plus you get to pair it with delicious things like potatoes and eggs and melted cheese. How could that be a bad thing? Is it a bad association with the vile cans of corned beef you can buy at the store (I recently saw a YouTube vlogger make sandwiches with canned corned beef and it was not pretty)? If you don’t like corned beef, please comment with your justification-inquiring minds want to know!

One of these days I’m going to corn my own beef. It’s pretty simple, just time consuming. I never think about it in time, though. Anyway, this slow cooker corned beef and cabbage could scarcely be considered a recipe, but I’m giving it to you anyway. Also, I don’t love cabbage, but I find that when prepared this way it doesn’t get über-soft, which equals stinky, and when cooked with the meat and then salted and buttered it absorbs a lot of those flavors. It’s quite good. If you just can’t do it, omit the cabbage and just have corned beef and potatoes!

Yield: 6 servings

Slow Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage

10 minPrep Time:

8 hr, 20 Cook Time:

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Ingredients

one 2.5-3 pound corned beef
8-12 red potatoes, quartered
1/2-3/4 head cabbage, thinly sliced/shredded
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
salt

Instructions

Open the corned beef and drain away any liquid. Place the corned beef fat-side up into a 6-quart slow cook (cut in half if you need to in order to make it fit). Sprinkle the contents of the seasoning packet over the corned beef. Arrange the potatoes around the corned beef. Cover and cook on low for 8 hours or high for 4 hours.
Pile the cabbage on top of the corned beef and potatoes in the slow cooker. Replace the lid. Cook for 20 to 30 minutes, until cabbage reaches desired tenderness.
Remove the cabbage from the slow cooker and place on a platter. Drizzle half of the butter over the cabbage and stir to coat. Add salt to taste.
Arrange the potatoes around the edges of the platter, mashing them up just slightly as you get them out of the cooker. Drizzle the remaining butter over the potatoes and salt to taste.
Thinly slice the corned beef and place on top of the cabbage. Serve immediately.

https://chattavore.com/slow-cooker-corned-beef-and-cabbage/

Click here to print the recipe for slow cooker corned beef and cabbage!

Chicken Bacon Alfredo Pasta Skillet

March 7, 2016

Who can turn down dinner that’s made in one skillet? This chicken bacon alfredo skillet is a complete meal with minimal clean-up!

My life is crazy busy these days. I work 40 hours a week, often eating lunch in my car and usually meeting deadlines by the skin of my teeth. Then I come home and work out (every day, because when you are a food blogger you can’t afford to NOT work out every day), make dinner, and settle into my second job. Wait, what? Oh yeah, I’m talking about blogging. I work on my blog from the time I finish dinner to the time I go to bed, and I think about it basically every second in between.

No wonder, then, that the fewer pans that I can dirty when I’m making dinner the better. When I’m planning what I’m going to cook, I’m always thinking, “How can I make this into a one-pan meal?”. Less washing, more time. ? How can you say no to that?

One-pan pasta is the best, because you don’t even have to drain it. Everything cooks in the pan all at the same time. I’ve shared something similar in this space before, but this time I got a little cheeky and used heavy cream instead of milk. Yes, that’s right. Heavy cream. Why, you ask? Alfredo pasta. Heavy cream = alfredo. Plus shredded chicken and bacon and broccoli and mozzarella. This chicken bacon alfredo pasta skillet (whew, that’s a mouthful) is a complete meal but you only have to dirty one skillet. And check out that cheese? This pasta skillet is weeknight worthy, for sure!

Mary

Yield: 4-8 servings

Chicken Bacon Alfredo Pasta Skillet

10 minPrep Time:

25 minCook Time:

35 minTotal Time:

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Ingredients

4 slices bacon, diced
1 head broccoli, washed and cut into small florets (save stem for a different use)
8 ounces small pasta, like shells or rotini
2 cups shredded chicken (I used the meat from 4 chicken thighs)
3 cups milk or 1 1/2 cups milk and 1 1/2 cups heavy cream (this is what I used)
8 ounces fresh mozzarella cheese, torn into small pieces
salt

Instructions

Cook the bacon over medium heat in a large (12-inch) oven-safe skillet until crisped. Remove with a slotted spoon to a paper-towel lined plate. Drain away all but one tablespoon of the bacon drippings.
Add the broccoli and cook, stirring frequently, for about one minute. Add the pasta and the chicken and stir to combine. Pour in the milk and/or cream and season with one teaspoon of salt.
Raise heat to medium-high and bring the pasta mixture to a boil. Cook until all the liquid is absorbed and the pasta is tender, 10-15 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the broiler.
Stir the bacon and 3/4 of the cheese into the pasta. Sprinkle the top of the pasta with the remaining cheese. Place under the broiler and cook until the cheese is browned. Serve immediately.

https://chattavore.com/chicken-bacon-alfredo-pasta-skillet/

Who can turn down dinner that's made in one skillet? This chicken bacon alfredo skillet is a complete meal with minimal clean-up! | recipe from Chattavore.com

Reuben Soup

March 4, 2016

Reuben soup has all the ingredients of a Reuben sandwich in a bowl!

What are your feelings about Reuben sandwiches?

It seems to me that Reubens are a sandwich that a lot of people really, really like…even when they wouldn’t touch the individual ingredients with a ten-foot pole. Let’s break this down: a Reuben is made from rye or marbled (pumpernickel & rye) bread, corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and Thousand Island or Russian dressing. Every single one of those ingredients is a little maligned, even, in my experience, Swiss cheese.

Okay, I’ll admit it. It’s me. IT’S ME that has a problem with those ingredients. Well, except corned beef (but I do know a LOT of people who don’t like corned beef. Those people live in a world that I don’t understand). I LOVE CORNED BEEF. I look forward to March every year because I know that corned beef briskets will be on sale for a week or two before ☘St. Patrick’s Day☘. My emotion when I see those sales = pure glee.

Anyway, anyway, back to Reubens. I really, really do not care for rye bread. I guess I am some sort of anomaly. There’s just a, I don’t know, “whangy” flavor to it (I was totally channeling my mom just now, you guys)…it’s the caraway seeds. And Swiss cheese is kind of bland, though I do cook with it a lot. And sauerkraut? Don’t get me started (yes, I know it’s good for you).

But here’s the thing: once you put all of those ingredients together into a sandwich and grill it up, something magical happens. It. Just. Works. As I thought about it, I started thinking…if it works that well in a sandwich, I’m willing to bet that it will work just as well in a soup. A creamy, Swiss cheesy soup base with potatoes and shredded corned beef, with sauerkraut stirred in and a little homemade Thousand Island drizzled on top, plus rye croutons? Reuben soup sounds like my kind of dinner.

This Reuben soup is a Reuben sandwich in a bowl. It’s hot, creamy, cheesy, and delicious. Just as magical as a Reuben sandwich.

Do you like Reubens? What about the individual ingredients? Comment below and let me know!

See this recipe and other great recipes on the Meal Plan Monday Link-up on Southern Plate!

Mary

Yield: 4 servings

Reuben Soup

15 minPrep Time:

15 minTotal Time:

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Ingredients

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 pound potatoes, scrubbed and diced
4 cups (or 1 32 ounce carton) low sodium chicken stock
3 tablespoons flour
1 cup milk
4 ounces Swiss cheese, grated
8 ounces (about 2 cups) corned beef, chopped or shredded
1 cup sauerkraut, well-drained
salt and pepper, to taste

For the rye croutons

6 slices rye bread, cut into cubes
1/4 cup olive or vegetable oil

For the sauce

1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup ketchup
1 1/2 teaspoons prepared horseradish or hot sauce
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 tablespoon pickle relish
1 clove garlic, minced

Instructions

In a small bowl, whisk together the sauce ingredients. Cover and refrigerate until ready to use.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. In a medium bowl, toss the bread cubes with the oil. Spread on a baking sheet and bake for 10-15 minutes, until crunchy, stirring halfway through cook time. Set aside.
In a 6-8 quart Dutch oven, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until translucent. Add the potatoes and the chicken stock and a bit of salt. Bring to a simmer and cook until the potatoes are tender.
Slowly whisk the milk into the flour then add to the soup. Stir until thickened then add in the cheese a handful at a time, stirring until melted after each addition.
Stir in the corned beef and the sauerkraut and cook until heated through. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately, topped with croutons and sauce.

https://chattavore.com/reuben-soup/

Reuben soup has all the ingredients of a Reuben sandwich in a bowl! | recipe from Chattavore.com

Lemon Chicken Thighs (Skillet Meal)

January 29, 2016

Lemon and chicken go together like peanut butter and jelly. These lemon chicken thighs are so tasty & easy to make-they’re a great quick weeknight dinner!

Is it just me, or does lemon chicken feel like a very nineties food? Or maybe it’s a very eighties food. It smacks of nostalgia to me, maybe because one of the first things that I learned how to cook (if you can really call it “learning to cook”) was frozen chicken breasts, thawed, sprinkled liberally with lemon pepper or Tony Cachere’s Cajun seasoning, and sautéed (probably in a dry skillet-the horror!) until it was cooked all the way through, which basically meant it was shoe leather. No wonder I ate so much honey mustard in my teen years.

But not all things that are “old” are bad, and lemon chicken is a prime example of that. I mean, I don’t really think that lemon chicken went out of style, though I can’t really think of many restaurants that are serving it these days. I mean, lemon just pairs beautifully with the mild flavor of chicken…but these days I make my lemon chicken with real lemon, not lemon pepper (I save my lemon pepper for my Ranch Goldfish).

We don’t have cable television anymore…haven’t for the last four years or so. Most days I’m okay with it, but other days I sorely miss Food Network. I have to take it where I can get it, so when a meager few episodes of Good Eats and Barefoot Contessa showed up on Netflix it was kind of exciting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched Ina Garten make lemon chicken breasts in the last few months (I’ve watched every episode at least ten times). Every time, that chicken looked better and better. Then I noticed that the recipe was in one of my Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, How Easy is That? (<—affiliate link).
One thing, though…I don’t usually cook chicken breasts. The extra fat in the thighs lends them a better flavor and makes them less likely to dry out, so I’m all about the thighs. A friend posted this cracklin’ chicken thighs recipe from Nom Nom Paleo and I knew exactly how I was going to cook these chicken thighs…cut out the bone, crisp the skin, then follow Ina’s lead for lemon-izing the chicken. Slightly crispy skin (I didn’t crisp mine quite as long because I knew I’d be roasting them and didn’t want them to overcook) and lemony, buttery sauce…these lemon chicken thighs are easy and so delicious. And not nineties at all.

This post contains an affiliate link. This means that if you click through and make a purchase, I will make a small commission from it. This does not affect the cost to you. Thank you for supporting my blog!

Mary

Yield: 4 servings

Crispy Lemon Chicken Thighs

This recipe is adapted from The Barefoot Contessa and NomNom Paleo.

10 minPrep Time:

15 minCook Time:

25 minTotal Time:

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Ingredients

4 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (you could buy boneless, but just make sure they have the skin on!)
salt and black pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup vermouth or dry white wine
1 tablespoon grated lemon zest (from 2 lemons)
Juice of one lemon (cut the other lemon that you zested into 8 wedges)
1 1/2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 teaspoon minced dried thyme leaves

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Carefully cut the bones out of the chicken thighs. This is very easy to do-there is only one bone. Just cut around it. Sprinkle both sides of the chicken thighs with salt and pepper.
Preheat the olive oil in a 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Brown the chicken, skin side down, for 4 minutes, then flip and brown the other side for one minute. Remove the chicken to a plate.
Remove the pan from the heat. Add the garlic then the vermouth or wine, lemon zest, lemon juice, oregano, thyme, and a teaspoon of salt and stir until combined.
Place the chicken thighs on top of the lemon sauce. Nestle the lemon wedges among the chicken thighs.
Place the chicken in the oven and roast until cooked through, 10-15 minutes. Serve immediately with the pan juices.

https://chattavore.com/lemon-chicken-thighs/

Lemon and chicken go together like peanut butter and jelly. These lemon chicken thighs are so tasty and incredibly easy to make, which makes them perfect for a quick weeknight dinner! | recipe from Chattavore

Vegetable Beef Soup

January 15, 2016

Vegetable beef soup is simple and old-school but so delicious and soothing it’s worth a share. It’s also easy to adapt to a paleo-friendly recipe!

My grandmother put alphabet pasta in her vegetable beef soup. It’s funny to remember it now, because she was pretty by the book and didn’t really do cutesy things with the food that she cooked. Alphabet soup was about as cutesy as it got for her. It was just one of those fun little things that made her soup memorable for me (as if I needed anything to make her cooking more memorable for me)…that and the fact that she always served soup with buttered saltines, which I remember lining up around my soup bowl on the plate that was always, always placed under a soup bowl when you dined at her table.

I have been cooking for more than twenty years now (though admittedly a lot of those first few years consisted of Hamburger Helper and frozen chicken that I made homemade chicken tenders from, making my roommates think I was a homemaker supreme especially since I always bought the BEST honey mustard). Oddly enough, I have never made vegetable beef soup. When I realized this a few weeks ago, I thought it was so strange because my mom used to make it on a fairly regular basis (I recall it as something that we used to eat on Monday nights, for some reason, and always with either cornbread or strawberry/blueberry muffins) and my grandmother did too.

So…vegetable beef soup. It’s hardly worthy of a recipe because it is so very very simple. However, I know that a lot of people don’t quite have the confidence or instinct in the kitchen that I do and might appreciate a little help throwing something together. If soup seems daunting to you, know that that’s all this soup is: throwing some things together in a pot. It made enough soup for six servings, which meant that I didn’t have to think about lunch for a couple of days (always a good thing), and while a lot of people still associate ground beef with “bad for you”, this soup is pretty healthy. You can even make it paleo by omitting the corn (you can sub in green beans if you’d like)…a lot of paleo people eat white potatoes on occasion, but you can leave them out too if you want. Or…leave out the meat and use olive oil to make it vegan.

And I didn’t add alphabet pasta, but you totally can if you want. ?

Yield: 6 servings

Vegetable Beef Soup

To make this recipe paleo, use bacon fat, not canola oil, and omit the corn. Most people in the paleo community find it acceptable to eat white potatoes on occasion.

20 minPrep Time:

35 minCook Time:

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Ingredients

1 tablespoon bacon fat or canola oil
1 small onion, diced
4 ounces cremini mushrooms, wiped clean and sliced
1 pound ground beef
3-4 carrots, scrubbed clean and diced
2 medium potatoes, scrubbed clean and diced
14.5 ounce diced tomatoes
32-ounce carton low-sodium vegetable broth
1 bay leaf
1 cup fresh or frozen corn
salt and pepper, to taste

Instructions

Heat the bacon fat or canola oil over medium heat in a 6-8 quart Dutch oven. Add the onion and cook until translucent. Add the mushrooms and cook until soft.
Crumble the ground beef into the pan and brown thoroughly. Drain away any excess fat. Add the carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, vegetable broth, and bay leaf to the pot and bring to a boil (I cover the pot to make it boil faster.
When the soup boils, reduce the heat to medium and simmer until the potatoes and carrots are tender, 15-20 minutes. Add the corn and cook for another minute or two.
Remove the bay leaf and season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately.

https://chattavore.com/vegetable-beef-soup/

Vegetable beef soup is full of vegetables and simple to adapt into a paleo or vegetarian or vegan meal! | Recipe from Chattavore.com

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