Crockpot Recipe: Chicken Sauce Piquante

 

This is a pretty versatile recipe—I made it with chicken, but in during my days in Louisiana, I had rabbit sauce piquante, alligator sauce piquante, squirrel sauce piquante…you get the idea.  “Piquante” is french for “prickly”—a reference to the spiciness of the sauce.

This dish has a ton of flavor & spice, without a lot of fat.  So let’s get started:

Ingredients:

3 lbs boneless, skinless chicken thighs, trimmed of excess fat & cut into strips

2 tsp cajun seasoning

1 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp white pepper

1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

1/2 cup instant roux mix

1 cup water

2 cups chopped onion

1 cup chopped bell pepper

1 cup celery

2 tbsp minced garlic

1 jalapeno, minced

1 cup canned crushed tomato

1 14oz can diced tomatoes

1 tsp Tabasco

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Directions:

Season the chicken with half of the spices & set aside.  In a large skillet, mix the roux powder and water & cook over medium-high heat, whisking to combine.  Bring to a boil, and then whisk constantly as the sauce thickens. 

Once the roux is nice & thick, add the onions, bell pepper, & celery to the mix, and cook for 5 miutes, stirring often.  Then add the jalapeno & garlic & cook for one more minute.

Transfer this to your crockpot & add the tomatoes, Tabasco sauce, seasoned chicken, and the rest of the spice mix. 

Stir to mix, cover, and cook either on High for 3.5 hours or Low for 8 hours.  Do a taste test & add additional seasoning+hot sauce to taste (we like a lot of heat, so we tend to use about double the cayenne & hot sauce).

Serve over steamed brown rice—you can garnish with some green onions if you have them.

(Note: our rice didn’t cook all the way through on their own, so we threw them into the crockpot at the very end to finish cooking & soak up some of the sauce.  This makes it look a bit like creole jambalaya, but the flavor is much different.)

What it would look like if we hadn’t mixed in the rice:

Makes 8-10 servings.

Nutrifacts:

Calories 209.3

  Total Fat 4.3 g

  Saturated Fat 1.1 g

  Polyunsaturated Fat 1.1 g

  Monounsaturated Fat 1.3 g

  Cholesterol 85.9 mg

  Sodium 983.8 mg

  Potassium 408.7 mg

   Total Carbohydrate 18.8 g

  Dietary Fiber 5.7 g

  Sugars 3.1 g

   Protein 22.3 g

Shared on 33 Shades of Green's Tasty Tuesdays