Crock Pot Chicken Marsala

I don’t know about you, but I love love love a crock pot meal. You just throw it together in the morning and by 6 p.m. you have a home cooked meal. And if you’re lucky — it’s something absolutely delicious.

It had been a while since I made Chicken Marsala, which really isn’t that hard to make, but because I don’t like to feel rushed before dinner, and I was busy yesterday, I decided to try a crockpot recipe that I found on the boards. The photo on Pinterest looks like this:

Sugar Free Mom has a nice printable recipe over there, so if you want it, check her out.

Here’s how I fared with it:

First, I started by slicing two pounds of boneless chicken breast length-wise.

Then I greased the crockpot with olive oil (though I am not sure why I had to do that, just following the recipe), and added the minced garlic and olive oil.

I seasoned the chicken with salt and pepper on both sides and laid the pieces in the pot.

Then I poured a bottle of Marsala wine over the chicken.

The bottle didn’t quite cover the chicken, so I added about a half-cup of chicken broth.

Sugar Free Mom says you can cook this on low for seven hours or high for three. I went for three, since it was the afternoon. (Long story, but I woke up and realized I didn’t actually have any Marsala wine, and by the time I got back from morning errands, it was mid-afternoon.)

So, I set the timer for three hours.

By five o’clock, I was ready to remove the chicken from the pot and start on the mushrooms. But here’s the thing — if I have to remove and put back then doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of the crockpot? I had to keep the chicken warm during the hour that the mushrooms were supposed to cook, so that meant I had to use another dish (and wash another dish) as well as turn on the oven. To me that’s not a true crockpot dish.

But whatever, it didn’t really matter because after cooking on high for three hours, I thought the chicken seemed kind of tough. (More on that in a sec.)

Now it was time to prepare the arrowroot and water mixture.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but arrowroot is not something I usually use in my Marsala, but I followed the recipe, mixed everything together and threw in ten ounces of Baby Bella mushrooms from Trader Joes. Sugar Free Mom calls for 14 ounces, but believe me when I tell you that ten did the job. I tell you this because I think these two factors had something to do with the final outcome.

But back to that chicken…I was worried it was going to be too tough, and we all like our chicken nice and tender, don’t we? So I decided to put it right back into the pot with the mushrooms and arrowroot in an attempt to tenderize it a bit. (This may also have been a factor in the final outcome.)

So an hour later, I served it over some pappardelle pasta.

Overall, it was not a meal my family would like me to make again any time soon. And I don’t blame Sugar Free Mom for the outcome, but still, I wonder if it would have been better to skip the arrowroot powder and just go with some good old-fashioned butter. Also, we weren’t happy with the mushrooms, which tasted like they had been grown in sh*t, which I realize is the case with mushrooms, but usually, you don’t get that sense when you eat them. The chicken was tender but a little dry, a strange dichotomy, probably induced by the high temp for three hours followed by the hour of simmering.

To be honest, it’s just as easy to do this one in a pan as it is in a crockpot.