Crock Pot Tamale Pie

I came across this Fit Marriage website a couple of weeks ago and noticed the nutrition tab, so I clicked on it to see what recipes they had posted. One recipe that caught my eye was this crock pot tamale pie. And guess what? The crock pot that is shown in the video is exactly like the one we have! Haha! We had all of the ingredients except the cornmeal, so I had Ryan pick some up so we could try this the next Sunday. We also didn't have any fire roasted diced tomatoes with chilies, so we just used a can of diced tomatoes without chilies.


Filling ingredients:
1 lb. cooked ground beef (I just used 1/2 a lb.)
1 15 oz. can black beans drained & rinsed
1 15 oz. can fire roasted diced tomatoes with chilies
1 15 oz. can corn drained
1 Tbsp. chili powder or taco seasoning
1 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 cup diced onions
1 cup cheddar cheese

Cornbread topping ingredients:
3/4 cup cornmeal
1 1/4 cup flour or gluten-free baking mix
1 tsp. baking powder – omit if using gluten-free mix that has baking powder
1 cup milk
1/4 cup sugar
1 large egg

Directions:
Spray stoneware with cooking spray.

Combine all filling ingredients from above in crock pot. Stir ingredients together until thoroughly mixed as you will not be able to mix again. (I combined all ingredients in a bowl, stirred them together, and then put the mixture in the crock pot.)

In a large bowl, mix all topping ingredients from above. Stir to a smooth texture, then pour topping onto filling in crock pot.

Cover and cook on low for 4-6 hours.


I think the recipe originally said 6-8 hours, and that's what the lady says in the video. Funny thing is, since the crock pot is exactly like ours, when I read/heard the 6-8 hours, I said out loud to Ryan "I bet it will be done in about 5 hours!" And then watching the video, they said it was done in 4 1/2 hours. Ha ha! I knew it! Every crock pot recipe I have ever tried has always been done a lot sooner than what the time on the recipe says. It is a good crock pot! :)

This recipe was perfect to make on Sunday--with 3 hours of church and then about an hour of choir practice, that's 4 hours. I set the timer for 4 1/2 hours and started it about 15 minutes before we left to go to church, so it only had about 15 minutes left by the time we got home! Right as we walked in the door, we immediately smelled the tamale pie and it smelled sooooo good!

I remember when I was younger, my mom occasionally bought canned tamales from the store. I used to eat them. Then I got sick of them after a while. When I tasted this crock pot tamale pie, it reminded me of when I used to eat canned tamales...only it was a LOT better!

So healthy! So delicious! So easy! You should try this! :)

One suggestion, though... even if you use a crock pot liner, you might still want to spray it with cooking spray. We didn't and the topping got stuck to it. Oops!

Pineapple Salsa Chicken

Guess where this recipe came from? If you guessed Mel's Kitchen Cafe, you are right! I LOVE that site! I've made five recipes so far from the site and none of them have disappointed me (us)! Ryan and I are still trying to eat healthy but also cheap now that we're starting to pay back his school loans. This is a great recipe that only uses four ingredients! The most expensive thing is the chicken, but it makes enough for three or four meals for the two of us, so it ends up being cheap! Hooray!


Ingredients:
6 fresh or frozen chicken breasts
1 (20-ounce) can crushed pineapple, drained
2 (15-ounce) cans black beans, rinsed and drained
2 cups mild or medium salsa

Directions:
Place the chicken in the crock pot and add the rest of the ingredients. Cook on low for 6 to 8 hours. Using tongs, remove the chicken to a cutting board and shred into bite-size pieces. Mix the chicken back in with the rest of the ingredients. The mixture will be fairly soupy – I like to drain off some of the excess liquid before serving, especially if we are eating it in tortillas, so it doesn’t make everything soggy. Serve with tortilla chips and garnishes, like tomatoes, cheese, avocado, sour cream, etc.


I didn't have crushed pineapple, so I used what we had which was pineapple tidbits. It worked out just fine. I also just cooked mine for 5 hours. Our crockpot cooks things really fast, so I checked it after 5 hours and it was done. We had ours on top of quinoa, and it was delicious! You could also put it on top of brown rice. We didn't add any of the listed garnishes on top, like tomatoes and cheese, but I'm sure it would taste even better with those things! I used two cans of black beans instead of one can of black beans and one can of great northern beans (that's what Mel used), but you can make yours however you want to. Next time, I'd probably add some herbs and spices to it, but other than that, it was great!

Crockpot Creamy Chicken

This was our first time cooking something in a crockpot, so we just found a very easy recipe to 'experiment' with. Now that we know how easy and delicious it really is, we're hoping to use our crockpot more often!!! We have a few recipes we want to try, so I'll post them when we get around to making them. I got this Creamy Chicken recipe here.


Ingredients:
4-5 chicken breasts
1 large can cream of chicken soup
1 small can cream of mushroom soup
2 carrots, sliced
1-2 tsp. seasoned salt
1/4 cup milk

Directions:
Place chicken breasts in bottom of crock pot and add both cans of soup over chicken. Add carrots, seasoned salt and milk over top. Cook on low for about 5-6 hours. (Read below for more info!)

Now, this recipe says to use frozen chicken, but as I was searching online for a simple recipe we could experiment with, I came across a website where someone said not to use frozen chicken. The reason is because meat needs to get to a certain temperature (I think 140 degrees) as quickly as possible. Otherwise there's a chance for bacteria to get in the food. I didn't want to risk anything, so we thawed/browned the chicken in a skillet first before putting it in the crock pot. Since we did that, we only had it cooking in the crock pot for about 3 1/2 hours instead of 5-6 hours.

We had a bag of baby carrots, so we just used them and cut a few of them up instead of using 2 bigger carrots. I also found other recipes that called for mushrooms, so we decided to put mushrooms in this one too. :)

It was kind of weird to me to have the milk just sitting on top in the crock pot, so after we poured the milk in, we kind of mixed things together a little bit.

Also, I wasn't sure what the "large can" and "small can" of soups were (we just have the same size cans of soups), so we used two cans of cream of chicken soup and one can of cream of mushroom.

See? We had to literally experiment with this! It's fun to experiment! (But just hope it turns out!) :)

It was delicious! We had it over brown rice with some green beans. Nice and healthy meal! :)

Crock Pot Lasagna

Ryan got this crockpot lasagna recipe from his work, so we decided to try it! It's actually really, really good! I love it!

Ingredients
1 lb. ground beef
2 garlic cloves
6 oz. tomato paste
5 oz. grated parmesan cheese
16 oz. lasagna noodles
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 yellow onion (chopped)
29 oz. tomato sauce
16 oz. cottage cheese
8 oz. shredded Mozzarella
1 tsp. dried oregano

Directions
Brown ground beef, onion and garlic in fry pan. (Ryan and I used minced garlic and minced onion.) Add tomato sauce, tomato paste, salt and oregano. (We used three 8 oz. cans of tomato sauce since that's all we had. It made it only 24 oz., so we added a tiny bit of water.) Cook until meat sauce is warm. Mix the cheeses in a separate bowl. Spoon a layer of meat sauce onto the bottom of the crock pot. Add a double layer of uncooked lasagna noodles (break to fit) and top with a layer of the cheeses. Repeat with sauce, noodles and cheeses until all are used up. Add 1/2 cup of water around the outside edge of the lasagna. Cover and cook on low for 4-5 hours. Serves 6.

This was delicious and easy to make! The sauce can also be used as a spaghetti sauce. It was SO good! It was a little runny when it was done, so we ate it in bowls. After it cooled off, it set up more and wasn't so runny. So maybe just using the three 8 oz. cans of tomato sauce would be fine without adding the extra water. We were just experimenting. :) See below for more suggestions!

(I've decided that it's hard to get a good picture of lasagna because it looks disgusting... but believe me... it was really tasty!)


Suggested Variations to Basic Crock Pot Lasagna Recipe
1. Be aware that the size and shape of your crock pot affects the timing. Also, some crock pots cook faster than others. This recipe is more time sensitive than most. Similar recipes have been dry - do not overcook. Add a bit more water especially if you will not be able to keep an eye on it.
2. Use pre cooked oven ready lasagna noodles - it cuts the cooking time in half. Or partially cooked regular noodles have been used. If using dry noodles, make sure they are covered in liquid to prevent burnt or dry edges. (Ryan and I used dry noodles, and we made sure to keep them away from the edge of the crock pot so they wouldn't burn.)
3. Suggested additional seasonings: fresh or dried basil, garlic powder, Italian seasoning, in the sauce, parsley flakes in the cottage cheese. Eggs have also been added to the cottage cheese & dried parmesan cheese as per oven lasagna recipes.
4. Ricotta cheese has been used instead of cottage cheese. This would be drier, so make allowances for that.
5. Simplify by using pre made spaghetti sauce instead of the other sauces.
6. Add canned or freshly cooked mushrooms.
7. Save some of the mozzerella cheese and put on top about one half hour before serving.
8. This recipe may be assembled in the pot the night before, refrigerated and cooked the next day. Shortens cooking time.

ENJOY!!! :)

Montreal Roast Beef Sandwich

This is another Crock Talk recipe from Maceys grocery store! Ryan sampled it at the store one day and said that it was really good, so we decided to make it for a nice Sunday dinner! It was simple and really easy to make! Neither one of us have ever made a roast in the crockpot before, so this was the first time. We thought we'd start with a simple recipe.


Ingredients
3 lbs. boneless chuck roast
Montreal Steak seasoning
3 cups water
(That's it! See? Really simple!)

Directions
Place roast in crock pot with 3 cups water. Season the top liberally with Montreal Steak seasoning. Cook on high for 8-10 hours. Shred meat with fork on a cutting board or platter and serve.

Tip: The meat is extremely moist but it will dry out fast if you don't serve or store immediately.


We cooked our roast for 8 hours and it was just fine. :) Put it on hoagie buns and you have a delicious sandwich!


Add your favorite sauce to it if you want. We put Bull's-Eye original barbeque sauce on our sandwiches. It was delicous!


Serve with whatever sides you want. We had baked potatoes (or rather nuked potatoes), and we also had some baby carrots on the side. It was a good hearty and healthy meal!


Ryan put some cheese on his sandwich as well as the barbeque sauce...


Eat it however you like! This roast is really really easy to make! You just need to give it 8 hours to cook in the crockpot. :)

Pizza Bake

Feel like pizza for dinner? You should try this!

For the past few months, Macey's grocery store has been including "crock talk" recipes in the sales paper. We tried the lasagna a while back, and today we decided to try the Pizza Bake! YUM! This entree can't decide if it wants to be a pizza or a pasta dish. Haha!


Ingredients:
1.5 lbs. ground beef
15 oz. pizza sauce
12 oz. egg noodles
4 oz. shredded mozzarella cheese
1 med. onion (we just used minced onion)
26 oz. spaghetti sauce
8 oz. shredded cheddar cheese
8 oz. sliced pepperoni (we didn't use the full 8 oz.)
1 green bell pepper

Directions:
Brown meat and saute onion and green pepper in a frying pan. Drain grease and add pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce. Cook noodles according to the package directions. Put layer of noodles, meat mixture, cheese and pepperoni in crock pot. Repeat layer. Cook on HIGH for 30 minutes and then on LOW 3 hours until the cheese melts.



I don't know what size crock pot you need for this recipe, but we had extra noodles and meat mixture that didn't fit in our crock pot... SO, we mixed them together and had little bowls of it (with parmasan cheese sprinkled on top) while we waited for the rest to cook in the crock pot:


We must have a good crock pot because we did it on high for 30 minutes and then on low for only 1 1/2 hours. The cheese was melted and it looked good! Also, the recipe online doesn't have mushrooms listed, but there was mushrooms listed on the recipe that we cut out of the sales paper. We added two 8 oz. cans of mushrooms. You could probably also add olives, sausage, or anything else that you like on a pizza! This was a delicious meal! It's fast and easy too! I'm sure the whole family would love it, especially the more picky eaters. ;)



Delicious!

Crockpot Chicken Dinner

I got this recipe from a friend a while back and thought I would try it! It cooked a little too long, but other than that, it was really tasty! I just followed the recipe, but I think I must have a really good crockpot because it seems food takes less time in my crockpot than what all the recipes say. Anyway, this was really quick to put together, and all you have to do is wait for it to get done--then you have a nice meal ready for your family!


Ingredients:
3 medium potatoes, cut into chunks
1/2 lb. fresh baby carrots (or chopped whole carrots)
2 medium onions, cut into chunks (we used minced onion)
1-2 lbs. Chicken tenders (or turkey)
1 can condensed tomato soup, undiluted
1/3 cup water 1 tsp. minced garlic
1 tsp. Italian seasoning
1 tsp. salt

Directions:
In 5-qt. slow cooker, layer potatoes, carrots, and onions. Top with meat. Combine soup, water, garlic, seasonings, and salt; pour over meat. Cover and cook on high for 7-8 hours or until meat is cooked and veggies are tender.
(Read below for my suggestions)

I only had ours cooking for 6 1/2 hours and it seemed like it was cooked too much. The veggies were a little mushy (but still good!), and the meat seemed a little dry. I think with my crockpot, 5-6 hours would be fine. I wonder if the 7-8 hours is if you use frozen chicken. We bought the chicken the day before we made this and kept it in the fridge, so it was not frozen. That could make a difference (but I read somewhere that it's not good using frozen chicken in the crockpot because it has to get to a certain temperature by a certain time, otherwise bacteria could get in your food). I'm also wondering if maybe it would be good to put the chicken on the bottom and veggies on top. That way the chicken would soak up more of the soup mixture and be more juicy. I don't know! We might experiment doing it that way and see how it turns out.

Anyway, just add a salad and veggies and homemade wheat bread to this chicken dinner, and it makes a nice, healthy and delicious meal! :)