Orange Chicken

I am in love with Pinterest. It's been less than 3 weeks but I just love it. It's fun to see things other people create. Truly inspiring. I've made several recipes from there this week alone. Here is one of them. In my true fashion, I didn't just make the recipe as written, but added and tweaked it a little. A few of the ingredients I bought at Olivelle which is a local specialty food shop. Lucky for all of you, you can order online and they ship!

The recipe I made was orange chicken. I thought it was delicious. My oldest daughter and my husband thought it was too spicy. I could have turned up the spice a bit, but thought I kept it pretty mild. You decide what's right for your family. Here's what you need:

3-4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts cut into small chunks
1/3 cup flour
Blood Orange olive oil (or regular olive oil if you don't have the blood orange)
1/2 Tbsp salt
1 T series 7 balsamic vinegar (use the best you can find)
1/4 cup ketchup
1/4 cup brown sugar
6 oz orange juice concentrate
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper (optional and can be varied depending on desired spicyness)

In your crock pot, combine the salt, vinegar, ketchup, brown sugar, red pepper and orange juice. Mix until smooth.

Place the chicken chunks into the flour, coating well. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet. The original recipe just called for regular olive oil, but using the blood orange oil made the chicken amazing. It is worth it to get the blood orange. Seriously, go to the Olivelle website and get some! Put your chicken in the skillet and brown it. It doesn't have to be cooked all the way through because it's going in the crock pot, but you do want the outside browned. This will probably have to be done in 2 batches.

 

Put the browned chicken into the crock pot. Cook on low for 5-6 hours. Serve with rice. It was a great change to the teriyaki chicken my husband would eat daily. Simple. Delicious. I suppose I'll have to leave out the red pepper on the next go-around. Enjoy!