Recipe: Slow Cooker Orange Chicken

Tonight for dinner, I made this recipe for Slow Cooker Orange Chicken. A word about the blog "A Year of Slow Cooking": it's awesome. Last year, Stephanie O'Dea made something in her slow cooker every day. That's 365 slow cooker recipes. Some things didn't turn out so well, but other things are fantastic. And while her year is over, she still posts recipes on the blog. I have a ton of her recipes starred in my Google Reader and this is about the fourth recipe we've tried and really liked.

She also has a lemon chicken recipe which I think we'll make next time. I've never had orange chicken at a restaurant to tell the truth, so this was a new experience for me. I followed the recipe, though I may have cut the chicken a little different and I used flour rather than the mix. Be warned, this is not a "throw it all in the pot and turn it on" type of meal. There was some prep in cutting, breading, and searing the chicken. But it was definitely worth it and prep time was only about 15 minutes (and I'm slow, so it would probably only take most people 5 or 10 minutes).

We ate it with instant white rice. I'm still not a fan of rice, but it was good here. Next time maybe I'll try brown rice.

As far as frugality goes, here's the breakdown:

Chicken - on sale for 1.69 a lb. This amount cost a little over 3 dollars (Dillons)

Orange juice - .99 at Aldi and I had half of the mix to make drinkable juice

We had everything else on hand this time around, and since it's mostly pantry staples, this meal comes in at leses than 3 dollars per person.