Crock Pot Sesame Honey Chicken

One of my new obsessions has been cooking in the crock pot.  It is so easy to just put all the ingredients in the crock pot, turn it on, and then come back after a few hours to a fully cooked meal.  So, when I find an easy and healthy recipe that can be cooked in the crock pot, I get super excited.

Sunday is usually my day of cooking so that I can have dinner in the fridge for a few days, but this Sunday I was pretty busy and didn't have time to stand over the stove for hours and cook dinner.  Then, I remembered this delicious recipe from skinnytaste.com for Sesame Honey Chicken (http://www.skinnytaste.com/2013/02/crock-pot-sesame-honey-chicken.html) and immediately decided to make it.   All I had to do was put the ingredients in the crock pot (which took about 15 minutes) and return after 4 hours and take everything out.   The sauce that the chicken cooks in pretty much just has honey, low sodium tamari sauce, onion powder, some water, garlic, tomato paste, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, and some cornstarch that you add at the end.  The original recipe calls for some sriracha sauce, but I omitted it because I tend to stay away from spice.  After the 4 hours, you just shred the chicken (which is super easy because the chicken is very tender), coat it all in the sauce, and add some sesame seeds and scallions on top.  Each serving of chicken is about 1/2 cup (on skinnytaste.com it says each serving is 2/3 cup but when I made it there was less than that), and I served it with 1/2 cup of brown rice and some steamed broccoli.

The sauce on the chicken is really delicious and it is very fragrant because of the sesame oil.  There is enough of the sauce that when you mix it with the rice, it coats the rice as well, which reminds me of a dish you could find in an asian restaurant, just much healthier.  My sister recommended that for next time, I cut the broccoli into bite sized pieces and mix that into the sauce with the chicken, which sounds like a great idea to me.  

This dish is super easy to make and is really delicious.  It is also healthy, which is just an added bonus!  And, if you don't have a crock pot, I recommend investing in one because it makes cooking dinner so much easier!  I have the Hamilton Beach Slow Cooker that I ordered from Amazon for a little under $50 (http://www.amazon.com/Hamilton-Beach-33967-6-Quart-Programmable/dp/B001AO2PXK), and trust me it is worth the price!