Slow-Cooker Balsamic Chicken

Here at the Fox Falcon's Nest, we just bought a new slow-cooker bearing the logo of our local NFL team, so this seemed to be a good time to renew my long-neglected blog. While we will be having hamburgers tonight during the football game, we broke in the new crock yesterday with the following recipe for Balsamic Chicken.

Since this is not my own recipe, I will respect copyright by letting you read it where I found it, at SkinnyMs.com. (Link should open in a new tab or window in most browsers so you don't lose your place here.) This recipe is naturally low-carb, which made it especially attractive for us.

Since we have never made this dish before, I decided to follow the recipe exactly. First, I inserted a slow-cooker liner. I love these things; they make cleanup a breeze. If you are worried about BPA, these liners are made of a nylon compound that does not contain BPA or other nasties that might leach into your food. It's the same stuff used to make turkey roasting bags.

I oiled the bottom of the liner as per the recipe and layered the chicken breasts in the bottom of the cooker. Next came the onion slices and herbs (Don't forget the garlic! Yum!), followed by the balsamic vinegar and diced tomatoes. I used canned tomatoes, but you could easily dice your own if you are so inclined. With everything in place, I put on the lid and turned the cooker to "High".

Unfortunately, I remembered I had to pull a rare Saturday afternoon shift at work, so I got dressed and turned the heat down to "Low" since it would be about 8-9 hours before we could eat it. This was an unplanned deviation from the recipe. Usually, you can trade between "High" for 4 hours or "Low" for 8 hours on most slow-cooker recipes, but this recipe seemed sensitive to the change, as the chicken seemed a bit dry when we did finally eat.

The recipe suggests serving this dish over angel hair pasta. Since pasta is generally too high in carbs for us, I served this up with a side of "Cornless Cornbread" and cauliflower with cheese sauce (not pictured). I'll post about the cornbread another time.

All in all, this was a very good recipe, and Mrs. Fox Falcon said she would be glad to add this to our meal rotation. Next time, I'll try cooking on "High" for the prescribed 4 hours and see if that improves the moistness of the chicken. For this meal, we just shredded the chicken with a fork and poured a little juice over it. Dee-lish!

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