What's Cooking: Orange Chicken

I'm back at it again (at least this week anyway). I've found another new recipe I wanted to try and I decided to share it with you all.

I've been hearing a lot of buzz lately about a site called Pinterest. I saw that a friend had joined and thought I should too. Basically, Pinterest is a site where you can organize what you would normally bookmark, but also share them with your friends. This way you can see all sorts of great ideas you may not normally stumble upon during a normal google search. I'm pretty slow to pin things at the moment, but hopefully over time I can build up a nice collection of interesting recipes, crafts, and other neat projects to pursue.

Anyway, my point: I have seen a number of great looking recipes that other people have pinned. One is for Orange Chicken cooked in the crock pot!

Modifications/Substitutions: I didn't cut the chicken into very small pieces because I wanted to be sure they wouldn't overcook and dry out. I ended up using vegetable oil instead of olive oil because my pan was pretty hot. Also, to spice things up a bit for Jonathan, we added a dash of red pepper flakes to his portion.

Ease: There was a little prep work involved in that I had to coat the chicken in flour and brown it before placing it in the slow cooker, but it was a simple and easy step. This was a very easy recipe to execute - 4.5 stars.

Affordability: I try to only buy boneless chicken when it is $1.99/pound. The other ingredients for this recipe are extremely affordable - 4 stars.

Taste: I had high expectations for this recipe. I loved being able to smell the chicken cooking, anticipating a wonderful feast. I was a little disappointed though. I managed to still overcook my chicken (ugh) and I think the sauce was a little tart (though this could be due to cooking it a tad too long). And the site the recipe comes from had pictures of genuine-looking orange chicken - mine looked nothing like it. Jonathan gives this recipe a 3.5 though. He was actually pretty happy with it.

Family Friendly: Why would your kids eat your chicken if your garbage disposal had a hard time chewing it? Seriously though, Abigail did really like the sauce and did actually eat some of the chicken. I think Sarah did try hers, but she passed on actually eating it. I think if I had executed this recipe better (like cutting down on the cook time) then we would have had more success. Poor chicken, only 2.5 stars for you. I am trying to make my kids like you, but cooking you is not one of my strengths.

What's Cooking Rating: 3.5 stars (rounded to the nearest 0.25)