Chicken Sausage Pilaf

Every once in awhile, you need to make a crockpot recipe because it just makes life a little bit easier that day. Throwing all your ingredients into a pot, setting it for a few hours, and coming home to a prepared dinner? Can't get much better than that. So for those weeks where we know we want an easily-prepared dinner, we turn to crockpot recipes. The one we tried this time, came from our Crockpot: 5 Ingredients or Less cookbook that my mom gave me awhile back for when I didn't know how to cook. I picked out this particular recipe because I had never heard of one of the ingredients (vermicelli) and we like sausage. This ended up being pretty good, although ours looked creamier than the picture in the book (I may have added too much broth). The only bummer about it was we accidentally left it out in the crockpot overnight and totally forgot to refrigerate it! Therefore, we only had it for one night and were disappointed that we couldn't enjoy it more!


Cooking Notes: The recipe originally called for celery stalks, but I substituted green onions. It also called for 4 cups chicken broth, and while I swear I did that, I may have added an extra cup. I'm still not sure! And we used chicken sausage, even though you could use turkey. Lastly, we didn't have a rice/vermicelli mix, so I just did a half cup of each and mixed it together to make my own.

Chicken Sausage Pilaf (adapted from Crockpot: 5 Ingredients or Less; serves 4)
1 lb. chicken sausage
1 cup uncooked rice and vermicelli pasta mix
4 cups chicken broth
2 green onions, chopped
1/4 cup slivered almonds
Salt & pepper, to taste

Brown sausage in a large skillet over medium-high heat, breaking up meat (only do this if yours isn't precooked like ours was). Place the sausage in the crockpot, adding the broth, green onions, almonds, S&P. Stir together until well mixed. Cover and cook on low for 7-10 hours or on high for 3-4 hours, until rice is tender.