Chicken Korma - Slow Cooker Tuesdays

I am all about short cuts in the kitchen.  

I love making a dish from scratch and used to balk at the idea of using a jar of anything.  

Then I had kids and time constraints hit me in the kitchen.

I still of course love flavour and I love making a variety of dishes.  Heck, you only live once, you might as well try everything on offer!

I also love improvising, much to my husband's dismay.  But in my defense, my improvising works. Mostly!

On this occasion, I came across a jar of simmer sauce when I was doing the groceries and figured it would work in the slow cooker.  Isn't that what a slow cooker does anyway?  Simmers (kind of) throughout the day?  Well, that was how I justified it in my mind.

For this recipe (fancy I can even call it that!), I used:

1 brown onion, roughly chopped

500g chicken tenderloins

1 jar Korma simmer sauce

1/4 - 1/2 cauliflower, chopped into florets

1 zucchini (corvette the courgette) diced

Garlic Naan

Jasmine rice
4 tbsp plain Greek yoghurt
1/2 Lebanese cucumber diced

I don't believe in browning anything before putting it into the slow cooker - that's how much of a short-cutter I am these days.

I tossed the chopped onion in first with the chicken and cauliflower on top.  I poured the simmer sauce over this, then filled the empty simmer sauce jar about halfway with water, put the lid back on, gave it a shake to get ALL the sauce off the sides (I hate waste) and poured that into the slow cooker as well. Gave it a good stir to coat the chicken and cauli in the sauce, put the slow cooker lid on and I set it to LOW.  Low and go slow!  

That was at about 7.30am.  

At about 1pm, I added the zucchini.

Come 5pm I put the rice cooker on (I know.  I used to do it myself on the stove once upon a time....)  It was also at this stage that I threw into the slow cooker some left over cooked pumpkin that I had in the fridge to warm up before serving.

With my spare time (!!) I decided to whip up a 'not quite' Raita. I diced the cucumber and mixed it in with the yoghurt and seasoned with salt to taste.

The plus with the Korma is that it is mild, so the kids enjoyed it immensely.

This is such a simple, effortless (quite literally) yet impressive dinner to make. 

Here's cheers to improvisation!