Cooking with Kat: Slow cooker enchilada orzo

I love a good slow cooker recipe because they’re so easy to just chuck on first thing in the morning and then when you’ve finished a busy day you’ve got something nice and warm to fill you up.
As I said in the video it is my intention to try and cook a couple of new recipes each month to add to my growing repertoire! Despite being mid move, I still wanted to do one last slow cooker meal prep to complete my freezer. I now have two weeks worth of meals in there that I can just defrost and microwave, making sure that I get plenty of good food at what is quite a stressful time.
When I saw this recipe I knew it was worth a try. I love pasta, I love Mexican food and it looked like it would freeze well and it contained cheese. Even better it seemed like a dump meal, where you don’t have to peel and chop veg, just dump things in from various tins and jars, so really the stars aligned and it felt like the perfect time to give it a try.
As I mention in the video, the recipe is American so I did have to make some substitutions, for instance using tinned tomatoes instead of fire roasted tomatoes, using stock instead of vegetable broth and having to use fajita sauce instead of enchilada. The subs didn’t really have a massive impact on the recipe I don’t think?! I think if I made this again I would definitely wait till I have enchilada sauce. The fajita sauce was nice but it was very smokey and quite rich so I think the enchilada would have gone better.
The recipe also calls for chillies, now I like spicy food, but I prefer my spice mild. I feel like I want to taste my food not make my face so numb that I can’t taste anything for days, so I left the chillies out. This was still spicy enough for me without the chillies.
The recipe also says to dump in the pasta about 45 min before you want to eat. Turns out 2 cups of pasta is quite a lot and it soaked up all the juice and stock in the slow cooker SUPER fast! It’s a good job I went to check on it after 20 min because it had gone solid. I had to add the rest of the stock in and a bit of water besides. I don’t know if it was because of that faff or because it took longer to cook, but it wasn’t quite ready after 45 minutes, I had to give it another 30 min, so I would say add the extra stock in and more water and give your pasta about an hour. I was cooking mine on low so maybe cooking it on high would have cooked the orzo faster, but there you have it. Just be aware of that if you try this recipe for yourself.
I used reduced fat cream cheese which helped to bring the calories down. I split it into 3 portions, each portion was a decent size as you can see from the video. It was definitely warming and filling. For me each portion came to 489 calories. I was quite happy with this for what is essentially comfort food. I froze the other two portions.
Now for my review of the recipe. I liked it, but it took me a while to realise that! When I first tried it after it was cooked I was thinking ‘I’m not sure I like this’ but then I kept eating it! So yeah it kind of snuck up on me. It’s definitely something a bit different than I’m used to, but I would defo eat it again. Think I also must try it with the enchilada sauce I think the choice of sauce had a lot to do with my initial reticence over the flavour.
I recommend giving this a go if you’re looking for a nice easy slow cooker Mexican recipe. You’ll find it here:
damndelicious....
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