Crockpot Chicken Mushroom Piccata recipe

I’ve posted about this before, but over the past year and a half I’ve refined the recipe a good bit. This is one of our favorite crockpot meals, and one of the few that actually gets semi-rave reviews from my mostly taciturn husband. (His idea of “praise” is “This isn’t bad.” Humph.)

So, another really good toss-it-in-and-have-dinner-by-nightfall meal:

Chicken Mushroom Piccata Recipe 

Place the following in the crockpot, more or less in order:

• as many chicken pieces, boneless or not, as will fit into the pot.  I did 4 breasts and 3 large boneless thighs. Frozen is fine, better even if your pot cooks hot.
• Prepare the night before in a bowl if you want to be really quick in the morning: half a pound sliced mushrooms, half a chopped onion, 2-3 tbs capers, 1/2 tsp paprika, 1/2 tsp black pepper, a couple of shakes hot pepper sauce (optional, but we like spiciness), 1/2 tsp salt (also optional), 1/2 cup white wine or sherry, 2 tbs lemon juice.  Before cooking, dump all this into the pot with the chicken.
• 2-3 thin lemon slices placed on top (or maybe a little lemon zest instead?) if you want to be really fancy. (I pretty much always skip this step.)

Cook on low 8 hours or so.  Serve over rice or pasta. If you like thicker sauce, you can make a slurry out of equal parts cool water and flour, drizzled into the crock while stirring, to thicken. Up to you…

That’s it. (I should specify that I didn’t really measure any of this stuff, just sort of glug-glugged and guessed.  I doubt it matters much.) Keep in mind that the ingredient list is fairly fluid–in order for it to be “piccata” I think you sort of need the capers and lemon juice. A vegetarian could probably double the shrooms and skip the chicken. You could use red wine instead of white and then you’d call it Coq au Vin (although there’s a better recipe for that here). The paprika is one of my favorite things, but it’s not absolutely necessary.  But this is delicious and company-worthy. Or just something nice for dinner that you can then eat for the next few days, or stretch into soup, or all kinds of things.

I love fall, when the crockpot comes out…