Slow Cooker Greek Chicken Tacos

If you've been enjoying some early summer salads and are looking for a change of pace, try this dish.  It's a great as salad, and as an appetizer, and works year round as an easy supper.  Since this is a year round dish, it's been in the queue for a while waiting to be published.
Last week I was participating in a G+ Food Bloggers Community Education event with +Chef Dennis Littley  and +Larry Deane, and Larry said "give your readers what they want".  That struck home with me, so since I've gotten requests for this recipe, it's bumped some fresh-from-the-CSA recipes to come out today.  How did folks know to request this?  They saw the photo on my FB page, that's how.

I intended to title this post Greek Artichoke Lemon Olive Chicken in a Slow Cooker, in the interests of being as descriptive as possible.  Then I thought about how we actually ate the resulting chicken, asked folks on FB for suggestions, and decided that Slow Cooker Greek Chicken "Taco" Meat is really a more apt title.  This dish is cooked in my crock pot, and does contain the artichoke, lemon, and olives I originally mentioned, but we use it like we use taco meat:  stretched on tortillas, over grains, or in a salad.  And the leftovers?  They make the best Greek Five Layer Dip I've ever had.  Possibly the only Greek Five Layer Dip I've ever had, too.  Try this in the summer when it's too hot to cook, or during football season for a delicious dinner/appetizer that's just familiar enough not to be weird and a delicious twist on a classic.

I may have alluded to my cold kitchen over the winter months.  Either the reference to the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve in the cold (down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit!) corner of my breakfast nook, or the photos of the frost on the inside of my kitchen window, seen in my Gardening Photos album on my FB page, would get the point across.
As cold as my kitchen is in the winter, it is correspondingly hot in the summer.  I do what I can, covering the East-facing windows with heat-blocking drapes in the morning and using the oven less.  I intend to get my grill on this summer, but there is another way to cook your food without heating the kitchen--a slow cooker.
This dish started with my desire to use my slow cooker to do the cooking while I was at work, and turned into a game to see how many complimentary layers of flavor I could add to the dish.  I was inspired by these other Greek Chicken Slow Cooker dishes, seen here and here, but since I had tortillas but no pitas, I went in a taco direction.  Then I read about Avocado Feta dip, and it was a great accompaniment to the chicken.

Berry Crust Pizza with Cranberry, Chicken, Red Onion and Mozzarella (Pizza Night!)

Yes, there are also strawberries in this photo.  They go into muffins, too.

Guess what we're eating from our backyard right now?  Berries!  How cool is that?  Last year our plants were young, and we ate a handful of raspberries from them but never managed to get a strawberry.  This year we're eating handfuls daily, and I've even put up some strawberries in the freezer.  If we don't grow enough raspberries to put up,  I'll find a pick your own or some good deals and put up a mess of berries like I usually do.  Berries are so easy to freeze (on a metal tray for several hours before transferring to a zip top bag), and they keep in an operational freezer until I'm ready to use them, like in these muffins. Please note my use of the phrase 'operational freezer'.

I did not start out with the intention of making a blueberry/raspberry crust so I could make a red, white, and blue pizza.  However, I am the sort of person who blooms where she is planted--and this pizza is the logical result of that trait.
I love my daughter, really I do--you're sensing a "but" here? Good.
It all started when she was hosting her social studies castle-building group.  It was fun to see the girls working together all over the main floor of our house.  The table in the living room was the main job site and the breakfast nook table was the glue gun station.  After each construction session my daughter would unplug the glue gun, and whoever needed the microwave next would plug it back in.  Things worked well for the first few sessions, but the third--really, how long does it take to build a castle out of cardboard?  Somehow, the microwave remained plugged in, and my little fruit and vegetable freezer aka microwave stand was unplugged instead.  No one noticed for a day.  Luckily the freezer was due for a defrost before summer "putting up" season got going, and much was still frozen or able to be salvaged.  I'm in good company--when Alyssa's freezer died, she made maple dijon chicken.
I also chose to get creative,  took the bags of thawed blueberries and raspberries, dumped them into my food processor, and made a puree.  We had a bunch of smoothies, and I used a cup of it in this crust--thinking I'd make a patriotic pizza.
I had leftover cooked chicken in the fridge, and excavated a bag of cranberries during the Big Defrost, so this pizza was predestined.  If your grill master is deployed, or you're just not that into the usual red, white, and blue stuff this year--try this.  In this pizza, chicken is optional.  With the creamy fresh mozzarella, tart cranberries, and red onion you can have a meatless, yet still patriotic, pizza.

Finnish Summer Soup--with Kale

Other possible post titles:  'Finish All The Kale' Finnish Summer Soup, and Kale Keskäkietto 

I hesitated to post this recipe now, because I'm not like Lydia who enjoys soup year 'round, or Karen who is addicted to soup.  I need cool weather, or at least a rainy day, to enjoy a comforting bowl of soup.  However, I've had several opportunities to enjoy this soup this Spring, so I thought I'd share and give you another kale idea since Spring 'tis the season for greens.

Because eating up each week's bag of kale from the CSA farm share doesn't come as effortlessly as eating up, say, a pint of strawberries, I need to work at it.  Throw in kids and it's a bit more effort.  This is where soup comes in.  I've found that if I puree vegetables in soup, my kids will eat them.  Even if it's green.  In the fall I put up kale (tear out the stems--feed them to the composting pigs or add them to the worm bin--blanch and freeze the leaves) and enjoy kale in hearty soups like this one.  But I'm not in a hearty soup mood when there's so much green outside.  Instead I wanted a summer soup.

This recipe comes from a little blue cookbook I've had for a long time, Fantastically Finnish: Recipes and Traditions by Beatrice Ojakangas, though I see it was published the same year as my son, and he's only like 5 or something I think.  I'm sure my mom picked it up, along with its Scandinavian brethren, at a Christmas bazaar.  Mom gave it to me because I spent a summer working in Finland and learned to cook a few recipes there.  Whenever I'd scan through the book this soup, Kesäkietto, always caught my eye.  In the head notes, the recipe comes from Esther Louma of Duluth, MN.  As written, it's a vegetarian recipe.  Because I recently had not one but 2 chicken carcasses burning a hole in my freezer, I spent a day making a pot of chicken jelly and substituted a quart of chicken jelly for the water (see NOTE below).  Since some varmint nibbled my pea plants (and parsley, and fennel, and tomato, and dill, though I have rescued almost all of them) I could not add the peas that this recipe calls for.  Therefore, I've utterly changed the recipe but kept the spirit of it--spring vegetables gently cooked in a milk-based broth.

I recommend you make this on a rainy late Spring/early Summer day, using whatever you've got available.  The nice thing about this recipe is that it makes 4 servings--so it's great if you have fewer eaters in the house, as you won't be eating this soup for a week.