Recipe: Trashy Chicken
I grew up under the impression that "real" people cooked their food as quickly as possible. Microwaves were heroic while Crock Pots® were deemed lazy and trashy. You know what? They kinda ARE lazy and trashy and during my Manhattan School of Music undergraduate days I realized that those are attributes to strive for. I bought a no-brand slow cooker for my Morningside Heights apartment (directly over a horrible Chinese restaurant, see footnote) and decided to come up with a dish that would exemplify and exalt both of those adjectives. Trashy Chicken was born.
This recipe is a lot of fun but if it didn't taste awesome I wouldn't post it. Everyone who has ever tried this ends up eating seconds or thirds. It keeps great and any leftovers will probably disappear in the middle of the night.
A few quite notes about ingredients:
CHICKEN. When I began making this dish I would boil the chicken thus rendering it as bland as possible. Later I got a microwave and started zapping the chicken. These days I buy frozen pre-cooked cubed chicken- my laziest method yet! Use only white meat. You don't want the depth that some dark meat would add.
BLACK PEPPER. I used pepper from a pepper mill but that's all wrong. Ideally you should be ripping open paper pepper packets lifted from Arby's or Burger King.
Total cooking time is about 2 hours when discounting the time to either cook chicken or rip open a bag of pre-cooked chicken.
You kind of need to use Campbell's but for every other ingredient there is only one rule: GO CHEAP. I accidentally bought Cream of Mushroom with Roasted Garlic which is too fancy but I wasn't going to run back to Sam's Club for the right thing. Partially seen: D2 spreading hay on the kitchen floor for our pig to sleep on.
1.5-ish lbs cooked chicken breasts
2 cups chicken stock/bullion cubes
1 10.5oz can Campbell's Cream Of Chicken
1 10.5oz can Campbell's Cream Of Mushroom
2 cups instant rice
Black pepper
With slow cooker on high add cooked chicken. If you are using frozen chicken you'll now need to let the cooker thaw it before proceeding to the next step.
Add chicken stock. Cover and wait one-half hour.
Add Cream Of Mushroom and Cream Of Chicken. Stir into the cooked chicken and the chicken stock. Re-cover the the pot sit for about an hour. Stir once or twice if you pass by.
Add instant rice. Stir well, making sure all the rice is moistened. Cover and wait one-half hour.
Add lots of pepper. Stir.
You're ready! Slop it into a plate and dig in.
Serving suggestion: the best accompaniment is canned green beans topped with some crumbled Lay's potato chips. Look at how colorless and flaccid these beans are. Perfection!
THE PROMISED FOOTNOTE
Keith Bonner (flutist extraordinaire) and I lived at 1272 Amsterdam, between 122nd and 123rd, apartment #1D from 1990-1992. In December 1990 there was a trash removal strike. The sidewalks were canyons, walls comprised of piles of trash-bags, a horrid reek wistling by, rats acting as coyotes. The Chinese restaurant's stock room was directly below my bedroom where I slept on a beat-up futon on the floor. They stored their trash in the stockroom and the stench came up through the floor and into my futon. Good times. My other complaint about sleeping on the restaurant's ceiling was that every Thursday after closing they would butcher live chickens. I could hear the cackling chicken then my futon actually shook when the "guillotine" hit the cutting board.
