Dinner in a Pinch: "Found Food"

If you're an English person like I am, you have probably at least heard of "Found Poetry," a type of literary art that allows a poet to take words by someone else--from an essay, a billboard, a recipe--wherever, and restructure them in such a way as to make a poem out of them. While the words may not be the poet's originals, the structure applied to them often gives them a brand new meaning. The poet creates this meaning using original line breaks, shapes, stanza breaks, parsing, etc.

I know the analogy I am about to draw is not perfect, but I found myself in sort of a predicament last night and the idea of "found food" struck me. Much like found poetry is a literary art that involves working with what the poet finds--what is already there, I like to think of found food as being a culinary art  that involves a person's crafting a meal out of what she finds--what is already there in her cabinets and cupboards.

I poured over my favorite slow cooker cookbook looking for a recipe that called for ingredients I knew I had on-hand (and I didn't have much, since my last trip to the grocery store was about a week ago and I buy only what I plan to cook during the course of a week). What I found was a recipe called "Chicken in a Hurry." The original recipe is pictured at the bottom of this post. The below recipe is my modification based on what I had on-hand. With just five ingredients and a simple, three-step process, it was super fast, super easy, and super delicious. The meat turned out somewhat sweet, and the resulting sauce was somewhat reminiscent of sweet barbecue sauce.

"Chicken in a Hurry" was a recipe made entirely from ingredients I just happened to have in my pantry already. It met my three most important requirements for a meal: fast, easy, and tasty. Above, the chicken is shown in its sauce on a bed of rice with oven-baked potato wedges and broccoli for sides.

Ingredients:
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 package dry onion soup mix

Process:
1. Spray slow cooker with cooking spray. Place chicken in slow cooker.
2. Combine remaining ingredients in separate mixing bowl. Pour over chicken.
3. Cover. Cook on HIGH 4-5 hours or on LOW 7-8 hours.

I served this dish with broccoli (for the recipe, click here), rice, and oven-baked potato wedges.

The original recipe is shown above. The only modification I made was using boneless, skinless chicken breasts as opposed to skinless chicken drumsticks. I also recommend spraying the inside of your slow cooker with cooking spray before adding the chicken.