Sometimes Recipes will go Horribly Wrong!

I have blogged about almost all of the food recipes that I have tried off of Pinterest and up until Friday night every single recipe I have tried on Pinterest has been worth repeating.  Friday night resulted in the de-pinning of a recipe (Gasp!  Shock!  This is on the same level of cruetly as de-friending on Facebook)! 

Let me start off by saying that it is possible I did not follow the directions exactly, so this could be a user error but with that being said I still will NOT be trying this recipe again.  The end result was a flavor that is not a favorite in our family.  We had  a really hard time getting it down and there was a serious discussion about whether a Domino's pizza should be ordered.

Slow Cooker Orange Chicken
Degree of Difficulty: 6
Mess Factor: 6
Taste: 2
Let me start by explaining that I always get frustrated with slow cooker recipes that require me to cook anything prior to placing it in the slow cooker.  The point of slow cooker recipes, to me, is that you throw everything in the pot and turn it on.  This recipe required you to coat the chicken in flour and brown it in oil prior to placing in the crockpot.  Not really a big deal, but just a hassle, especially in the hustle and bustle of the morning.  Below is a basic walkthrough of the process along with comments on the final product:

There really weren't too many ingredients in this recipe, which is one of the reasons we decided to try it out.  The only ingredient you don't see in this pic is the chicken as it is off to the left waiting to be trimmed and cut into small pieces. 

This is a pic of my browning process.  I had a small bowl of flour that was used to coat the chicken.  It really doesn't take long to brown the chicken since it doesn't need to be cooked all the way through.  While I was browning the chicken, I made the sauce.

The sauce doesn't look like much, but it is predominantly orange juice concentrate.  If you really don't like orange flavoring (apparently I don't), then I would really recommend skipping this recipe. 

Place the browned chicken and the sauce into the crockpot and turn to low.  I made the mistake of cooking this for 6 or so hours since I made this dish in the morning.  If you do decide to try out this recipe, I wouldn't cook it for more than 3 hours.  This is a problem for me because I prefer to put everything in the crockpot in the morning and then forget about it the rest of the day. 

This is a pic of the end result.  Please note that this is after we had already served up some pieces and had it turned off for at least an hour, but the color is pretty true to how it looked in person.  At the end of the day, the dish just cooked too long in the crockpot so the chicken was really dry. 

Oh well, not my favorite recipe but they can't all be winneres.  I promise to post another recipe either today or early tomorrow with a Pinterest recipe that did work out well. 

Lori