I’ve been intrigued by the whole crock pot phenomenon for quite some time now, but have been reluctant to jump on the band wagon for 2 reasons. 1, most crock pot meals center around a hunk of meat and I’m a quasi-vegetarian (I do eat seafood.) 2, most recipes have a bunch of processed canned foods and we try to avoid them. Beans though, beans can be cooked in a crock pot, right? Enter this recipe.
Now, it should be clear by now that I’m not great at following directions. 😉 First off, Michael cooks beans all the time and he scoffed at the recipe calling for boiling the beans for 10 minutes and letting them soak for an hour. We soaked them overnight instead and cooked them longer.
Next up the veggies. It called for 1 carrot, but I used about 3/4 of a cup of baby carrots. Likewise, I upped the celery from one stalk to 4. Hey, veggies are good right? Onion and garlic, check. We used one orange bell pepper instead of 2 green ones and I left out the jalapenos because Kate’s not a huge fan of spicy foods. I’m not entirely sure how that can be since her amniotic fluid was probably 90% salsa, but it is what it is. 🙂 Michael and I added salsa at the table.
I used 5 fresh tomatoes in place of the can of tomato. The other big change I made was to add the veggies at the beginning and let them cook all day instead of just the last 3 hours because, I’ll be honest, I had no intention of pulling half of this out and pureeing it. Seriously, people do this?
Spices, check. 🙂 I started it at 9AM, all of the veggies were in by 10AM and the crockpot switched from High Heat to Warm (All on its own! How cool is that?) at 3PM. Oh, and I subbed quinoa in place of the rice and lentils. I added the quinoa at 5PM and we ate at 6PM.
I served it up with a bit of cheese, salsa, avocado and fresh lime.
We both agreed that it needed more salt. Seriously, even Michael added salt. Next time I’ll replace the celery with zucchini as Michael was not a huge fan of the celery. Michael wants the onions sauteed, but I’m too lazy busy to add another step.
Now this wasn’t exactly the super easy crock pot meal I had been envisioning (it took me an hour to cut up all of the vegetables and stuff) but it was nice to get it done in the morning instead of scrambling after work. Also, it made a ton of food. I think we could get another 15 meals out of it. (Not quite, but 2 more easily.) In the interest of full disclosure, we have a larger oval crock pot. I’m not sure that all of these veggies would have fit it a smaller one.