concerning kitchen snobbery: recipes #3

I forgot to buy skewers to make these frankfurter kabobs...arrghhh! So instead we'll do the next recipe on the list, which is Chickenetti. Is it chicken, is it spaghetti? Who knows.

Chickenetti:

1 cup fat-free, low sodium chicken broth
16-oz. pkg. spaghetti, cooked
4-6 cups cubed and cooked chicken, or turkey, breast
10.75 can fat-free low sodium cream of mushroom soup or cream of celery soup
1 cup water
1/4 cup green pepper, chopped
1/2 cup diced celery
1/2 tsp. black pepper
1 med. onion, grated
1/2 lb. fat-free white or yellow American cheese, cubed

Put chicken broth into very large slow cooker. Add spaghetti and chicken. In large bowl, combine soup and water until smooth. Stir in remaining ingredients; then pour into slow cooker. Cover. Cook on low 2-3 hours.

Once again we will be halving the recipe because it claims to serve 10 people, and I don't need that much food. Also, chicken breast is expensive and I don't have a big slow cooker.

I really did not read through the ingredients well before cooking because I found myself at 5pm in the kitchen just getting started on what I thought was a simple 'throw things in the slow cooker' kind of recipe. Then I looked closer and realized I had to pre cook the spaghetti. Then I discovered I had to pre cook the chicken. See, this is not my idea of a slow cooker meal. If I have to cook things before I can cook things then my slow cooker is not saving me energy costs or time. I put the chicken in the oven and get started on what turned out to be almost an HOUR of prep. If you halve 1/4 cup of chopped green pepper you are very carefully trying to measure out 1/8 of a cup of pepper. Was 1/8 of a cup of bell pepper going to drastically change the taste or texture of a bowl of spaghetti covered in cheese? I was getting very frustrated doing this. But I stuck to my guns about not improvising and was very carefully measuring everything.

Two and a half hours later we sat down to dinner. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. You could definately taste the onion grated in, but the pepper and celery were non-existant. The noodles had broken up in the slow cooker (which I had figured would happen. If you cook already cooked pasta in broth for two hours what do you expect is going to happen?) which kind of negated the point of using spaghetti noodles. (Actually I used Vermicelli.) And although I had carefully measured out the liquid to be used it had no sauce at all. After we finished dinner my husband turned to me and said "You told me to be honest, right?" "Right." "What kind of cheese did you use in that?" I was confused. I told him I'd used American cheese, of course, like it said. "American cheese is cheddar, right? I think it's just another term for it. So, it said white or yellow and I used marble cheese, which is just white and yellow cheddar." And then I googled American cheese. In case you also didn't know what it was, American cheese is processed cheese, like Velveeta.

I feel a little dumb. I also feel like since I used the wrong cheese I owe Chickenetti a second time. I am going to re-make this recipe, but I'm going to try a different version of it. Chickenetti, take two.