I love my crock pot.

I know, I've said that before but I really REALLY do!  I want to get a small one for things like I did last night.  Here's how to feed a family of 5 (mine is a fam of 7 but the babies eat off of me...) for a lot less than you'd think.

3 chicken breasts, (you can do this with a whole chicken, cooked and deboned but you'll skip the crockpot for it.)
5 cups of rice,
1 large bag of frozen broccoli bits
4 cans of broccoli cheese soup.
a little bit of milk or cream depending on  your flavor.

water.


I have a rice cooker.  LOVE THAT THING!  I ended up using my rice cooker as a crock pot and in retrospect, should have used my crock pot as a rice cooker.  I put 3 (massive) chicken breasts in the crock pot with about 4 cups of water.  let it cook until done.  (mine has a 4/6/8/10 hour function, so I put them in frozen on the 4 hour timer, came out PERFECT!) pull out the chicken and shred it up and hten put it back in.I added 5 cups of "instant" rice (buy mine in bulk from sams club for like $4 or something), 3 more cups of water, and 2 of the cans of soup plus the bag of frozen broccoli.  Set it back on 4 hours until it starts to thicken up.  feel free to stir in the soup, btw.

On the stove (or you could do this back in the crockpot, but i wanted a sauce) mix 2 cans of broccoli cheese soup with 1 can of milk plus a little bit of cream.  wisk that up over a fire until you get it to be a cheesy soupy but not too thin sauce consistency.

once everything is in the crock pot completely cooked, you can dish it up, add extra sauce and enjoy!  This made enough for 5 people, to have seconds with PLENTY of leftovers for tonight!

I am stoked.  Total cost for 2 meals for essentially 10 people:  $6.  Super smart, and savvy.  Oh, and the crockpot- (my electronic bff; hey, no jokes here people, this is a clean blog!) totally saved dinner. :D  I love NOT having to gunk up tons of pots and pans!

I wonder if I could make this ahead of time and freeze!  that'll be my next endeavor!!