Name: Slow Cooker Apricot Chicken Casserole
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 480 min
Total time: 495 min
Ingredients: 250 ml chicken or vegetable stock; 1 medium onion; 125 g dried apricots; 125 g baby sweetcorn; 1 yellow pepper; 400 g new potatoes; 2 tablespoons flour ((30ml)); 1 teaspoon garam masala ((5ml)); 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon ((2.5ml)); 1/2 teaspoon salt ((2.5ml)); 600 g skinless, boneless chicken joints

Slow Cooker Apricot Chicken Casserole is a one-step recipe, without any pre-cooking. Chuck the ingredients in and leave to cook all day for a tasty, aromatic chicken supper.

Slow Cooker Apricot Chicken Casserole

Continuing with one-step slow cooker recipes, here’s one for Apricot Chicken Casserole. The chicken joints are coated in spiced flour to give a good flavour and to thicken the sauce. The apricots will also soften and start to break down which adds to the sauce and gives a touch of fruitiness without much sweetness.

I like fruit in casseroles, but I don’t like sweet meat dishes. The odd teaspoon of honey is fine, but any more and it really doesn’t appeal. There isn’t any sweetener in here, although that teaspoon of honey might be quite nice.

Potatoes and vegetables

Talking to my daughter about slow cooker recipes, she said that she always likes it to be a complete meal, so that she can just dish up and eat. She doesn’t mind the odd bit of prep, especially if it can be done the night before, but she doesn’t want to cook when she gets home. I can sympathise.

That’s exactly how I felt (and still feel). In the evening, before dinner, is not the time that I want to be cooking – even peas can be a challenge some days.

So there are plenty of vegetables in this casserole, including potatoes. I’m using new potatoes so they don’t have to be peeled, but they don’t need to be small potatoes for this recipe as they’re cubed.

There’s also a pepper, onion and some baby sweetcorn, which cook surprisingly well in here. They hold their shape and some texture. The only thing to be careful about is making sure they’re under the liquid level – or at least under the chicken. They still taste fine but they can look a bit browned off if they are left exposed.

Prepare the night before

The night before you can do most of the preparation:

Chop the onion, pepper and apricot and put in a plastic box in the fridge
Cut up the chicken and coat in the spiced flour. Leave in a covered dish in the fridge

You’ll need to heat the stock on the day when you put everything together. While it’s heating you can chop the potatoes, which don’t keep well overnight. So you can reduce the preparation on the day by about 10 minutes. And we can all get up 5 minutes earlier, so no excuses!

Helpful Tools

Slow Cooker – obviously that’s pretty helpful here. I looked at Slow Cookers for ages before buying a digital Morphy Richards 3.5l version.

What I like about this:

It will automatically keep warm for 2 hours after it finishes cooking
The pot can be used on the hob, so when I do want to brown meat or vegetables beforehand I don’t need to use a saucepan.

Drawbacks:

If you want to use a timer to switch the cooker on, you need one with a manual timer, not a digital timer
No AUTO cook (HIGH at first then switches to LOW), but I haven’t found that to be a problem

Slow Cooker Liner – not essential, but keeps the cooker clean.

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