The Final Four recipes are:
Soups
Meaty
2. café rio shredded beef
Chicken
Other
Because I wanted to really make sure the right recipes made it to the finals, I enlisted 2 people to make each set of recipes. Luckily, the results were unanimous and there were clear winners.
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| Cafe Rio Beef (photo by Jessie from http://borntocrock.blogspot.com/) |
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| Cordon Bleu Soup |
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Recipe:
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Prep time/ease of
ingredients (10 points) |
Likeliness of
making it again (30 points) |
Overall flavor (50
points) |
Value $ (10 points)
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8/9
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30/30
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45/50
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8/9
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8/9
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30/30
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45/50
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8/10
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Recipe 1 notes and
review:
The ingredients for this soup were easy to find, I had most of it on hand already. I didn’t have tarragon on hand, but I did enjoy using it for the first time. We would eat this again, but when we voted, we all had liked the Cafe Rio Beef more. It also seemed as though it was a bit more expensive, just because it has more expensive spices in it!
This was delicious! I loved the tarragon in |
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Recipe 2 notes and
review:
I liked that we had everything on hand to make this recipe. I did go to the store to get the ingredients for the dressing, but that was just because I wanted to try it and see how it compared to the recipe I usually make. We weren’t sure we loved the dressing on the beef, it seemed to clash a little bit, but it did taste great on a salad and the beef was great without the dressing too! The beef was a big hit with those of us that eat meat at our house. Our older daughter even loved it, she doesn’t love the sweet pork, so I was surprised she loved this. We used the beef in different ways, I had a salad with the beef and my husband and daughter had a burrito. I didn’t feel that it took too long to put this together, I did a lot of the prep work the night before, so we could just throw it together in the morning. It makes quite a lot too, we had enough beef to have it twice, and I froze some for later too!
This was hard to decide which we liked best, but everyone agreed they liked this one more (except me – I like them both equally) and they would eat this more often. The shredded beef would also freeze well so I would make extra when meat is on sale and freeze portions for later. This is delicious! It has lots of flavor but its not too spicy. I had some of the meat on a roll the next day and it tasted even better the second day. |
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Final Score:
Cordon Bleu Soup: 189
Cafe Rio Shredded Beef: 190
Review by Cathy (in blue) and Lori (in yellow)
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| Hawaiian Chicken |
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Recipe:
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Prep time/ease of ingredients (10 points)
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Likeliness of making it again (30 points)
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Overall flavor (50 points)
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Value $ (10 points)
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| Hawaiian Chicken | 10/10 |
25/25
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45/45 | 10/10 |
| Turkey Lasagna | 10/8 |
30/10
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50/20 | 9/10 |
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Recipe 1 notes and review:
I was a little skeptical of this dish at first because I don’t love warm fruit, but I was gladly mistaken. This dish was so easy to prepare with very few steps and not many dirty dishes! The ingredients were easy to find. This dish took 4 hours in our Slow Cooker and was ready by lunch. The first “words” out of my husbands mouth were “oohh, oohh man this is good!” The dish was very flavorful and we did not need to add any extra seasoning. We poured it over White Rice. I would make this recipe again as it is now one of my husband’s new favorites. The price of this meal was very reasonable.
I halved this recipe and it was the perfect amount for my family. I
served it over rice and there were no leftovers. This, to me, was exactly what a slow cooker meal should be. The total prep time was less than 10 minutes, it cooked perfectly, the house smelled wonderful, and every person in the family ate it without complaint. I will definitely make this again but might try to tweak the sauce slightly because I wanted more of a zing. If you got the “perfect” bite—some sauce, peppers, pineapple, chicken, and rice—it was delicious.
The value of this meal is excellent, especially because it is basically
pantry items. |
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Recipe 2 notes and review:
I was very excited to learn that you could make Lasagna in the Slow Cooker! I had a hard time finding Ground Turkey Sausage but then discovered it’s in the breakfast freezer section! All the other ingredients were easy to find. It didn’t take too long to make, just browning the Sausage was the most time consuming but I could get the other ingredients ready while that browned. The overall flavor was a little bland even with adding salt and pepper, but I love Lasagna and still thought it was good. My son whose is 18 months old even ate this one. I think the price was average for the cost of Lasagna. I would make this again and use a different Spaghetti sauce that had more seasoning. It’s a nice “fast” meal in 3-5 hours.
I prefer my slow cooker recipes to be “throw in the pot and go” meals,
but it only took 10 minutes to chop the onion and then brown the meat. Mixing the meat with the ricotta/cheese/sauce made the layering in the pot easy. The overall prep time was much less than my usual lasagna prep time—it was probably only 20 minutes from the time I started to brown the meat until I turned on the slow cooker.
However, my family did not like this meal. I’ve never made lasagna with
a store-bought sauce and so it is very possible that our aversion to the taste was completely due to the sauce flavor, and I hate to score this meal so low based on the flavor of the sauce, but it just was not a success at our house. Although maybe it wasn’t the sauce. Maybe we hate turkey sausage or ricotta cheese or green peppers in our lasagna. It’s hard to tell what, exactly, we all found so unappetizing. Even my youngest, who normally eats anything served to him, refused more than two bites. I will absolutely make lasagna in the slow cooker again, but next time I’ll use a homemade sauce and try the cottage cheese.
The pros of this recipe: It made a lot, so the value is great
especially if you have most of the ingredients on hand like I did. It would easily have made two full dinners plus a lunch for my family of four. It also looked pretty and came out of the pot perfectly. |
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Final Score:
Hawaiian Chicken: 180
Turkey Lasagna: 147
Review by Daphne (in blue) and Jennifer (in yellow)
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| Turkey Lasagna |
The recipes that will go to the finals are the Hawaiian Chicken and the Cafe Rio Shredded Beef. Because it’s my blog, I’ll be the one to review these two and decide the winner. But you can play along at home if you want to form your own opinions 🙂
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