Chicken Cacciatore Recipe, A Challenge and a VICTORY!

Daily Activity: Ran 5 Miles!!! (6 APs)

I'll start with the recipe I made for dinner tonight. It was Crockpot Chicken Cacciatore, which is a complete bitch to spell by the way. I'm still not even sure I got it right, but you get the point. Tim bought me this Slow Cooker book from Books-a-Million a while back that was in the super -super -extra clearance- like we might just give it to you for free -area. It has produced some really great recipes though and one of them is this Chicken Cacciatore.

Here are the ingredients you will need to make this dish:

A pile of chicken drumsticks, skin removed.

Diced tomatoes, Red wine, Tomato paste, Minced garlic, 2 onions, parsley, and thyme (last 3 not shown).

1. Heat 2 Tbsp Olive oil in a large skillet. Brown chicken on all sides for about 7-8 minutes total. Remove chicken to crockpot.

2. Slice 2 onions. Cook in remaining oil until onions become slightly golden brown.






3. Add minced garlic (I didn't measure, maybe about 1 1/2 Tbsp), 2/3 cup red wine, 1 can diced tomatoes, 1 Tbsp tomato paste, thyme (fresh or dried, again I didn't measure), and fresh parsley to skillet.

4. Bring all ingredients to a boil and add to crockpot with drumsticks. It should look something like that pile of delicousness to the left.

5. Cook in crockpot on low for 5 hours. I think this dish is traditionally served with pasta but I just served the chicken with the sauce and a side salad to reduce the points.

I didn't take any pictures of the finished product because honestly it didn't look very picturesque, but it tasted pretty damn good. Well ... I thought it was pretty good, but Tim made obscene noises while he ate so I'll round that out to .. pretty damn good. I also made some homemade potato bread in the bread maker to serve along side.

The Chicken Cacciatore is 4 points/serving. Each serving is one drumstick. Pretty decent!

On to other news:

We cleaned out our deep freezer today, and we have a ridiculous amount of food we didn't even realize we had. I didn't count but I would say that we had about 40 or so Lean Cuisines, Lean Pockets, etc. We had countless packs of frozen chicken breast, thighs, tenders, porkchops ... and on and on. We decided we are going to try to make it to the end of the month without shopping for meat or frozen vegetables. At first I was going to try to not go grocery shopping at all, but obviously having a child in the house we are going to need certain things, and we'll definitely need fresh fruit and fresh vegetables from time to time. But I'm really going to make an effort to plan our meals around the things we have in our freezer.

I tried to make an inventory on this program that I downloaded called Living Cookbook, but it turned out to be way too time consuming and frustrating, so I gave up. Does anyone have any good programs they can recommend for compiling all my recipes into one program? I'd love something that tells you the nutrition info, makes grocery list, and keeps an inventory of items on hand. Is that asking too much?

I also ran 5 miles tonight!! I mentioned in a previous blog how I never could quite make it to that point. Well tonight I decided I was going to run 5 miles or die trying! Its amazing what you can do when you set your mind to it.

Tomorrow is weigh-in day. So far things aren't looking so good for this week as far as the scale goes. But I'll let you know the official results in the morning.