Palma Quagliata- Moroccan Stew with Chicken
I decided to try Tracy’s Campbell Slow Cooker challenge only because, well, she seemed to be having a difficult time finding a taker for the Moroccan Stew. I, like Tracy, do not typically use packaged ready to go mixes, preferring to chop and dice vegetables and herbs to pull together a meal. Although I was intrigued when, as a selling point, Tracy mentioned it had green olive and lemon flavors.
To begin, I was encouraged to see that it was not a powder mix, (yes, I was thinking Hamburger Helper of the “70’s) but a sauce in which I could see slices of the green olives, plenty of them! I had prepared chicken thighs by pulling off the skin and all fat (yuck), immersed them in the sauce, turning the crockpot on low, and walked away! About 4 hours later, I turned them, moved the dial to high and kept the cover off for about an hour. My purpose was to thicken the sauce, although I must confess here I’m sure Tracy has covered this in her many crockpot recipes, but I just don’t do much crockpot cooking. I instinctively took the cover off because that’s what you would do if you were cooking on the stove.
The finished product looked lovely with its rich glaze of a sauce. I had prepared sliced green olives, cilantro and lemon just incase it needed it, but I wanted to taste without it first. What you see in the picture is no additional olives, just the package and chicken. The flavor was great, the spices really permeated the chicken and sauce texture was lush, it had maybe a tad bit too much black pepper flavor at the end. My boys said it was good, but wanted to taste more Moroccan flavors—this I attribute to the fact that they are used to a fresher style of cooking where they could taste individual flavors. At that point we tossed on the cilantro, olives and squeeze of lemon and Voila!, really, really good! You could probably get away with just a squeeze of lemon to bring it up a notch. Much later when my husband came home, I put a plate in front of him not saying a word about the preparation, he thought it was really good. When I told him it came from a package, he was really surprised….and still gave it a “really good” review!
Likes and dislikes—I must say crockpot cooking is so useful! I don’t do much of it but this Campbell experiment really speaks to the ease and convenience of it. I will try some of the other flavors because this one was so good. There was nothing to dislike here- a small critique would be the black pepper was a bit strong, nothing that a squeeze of lemon can’t fix!
