Gluten-Free Three Bean Sweet Potato Slow Cooker Chicken Soup

Adapting recipes from Stephanie O’Dea’s More Make It Fast Cook It Slow or her blog happens a lot in my kitchen. I’ll start looking through the book and see something that sounds good, but I don’t have all the ingredients or I have chicken breasts instead of thighs or my family doesn’t like a certain spice and I just start throwing what I do have into the slow cooker. Somehow it all works and I think part of it is Stephanie’s recipes are a good foundation of techniques and basic flavors that lend themselves to creative tweaking. It also has to be Stephanie’s casual, playful can do attitude. If you get the chance to see her speak, do! The secret to her success is her “let’s just throw this in and make some dinner” attitude that starts with using good ingredients and the need to get food on the table each night for a busy family. No hushed reverence and serious chefy attitude here– it’s “let’s get this done and go have some fun with my kids.” So she gives you permission to adapt and play with the recipes too. My latest riff is this Sweet Potato Three Bean Spicy Chicken Soup. Her recipe had shredded sweet potato, but I wanted chunks. Her recipe had cinnamon and cloves and my menfolk said no thanks. I had two leftover chicken breasts and her recipe called for thighs. I liked the idea of mustard, honey and tamari but used the whole grain mustard in my fridge. So here’s the link to Steph’s 21 Ingredient Chili and here is what it became in my slow cooker:

I didn’t add salt because of all the canned beans, tamari and chicken broth. If you use homemade beans, it will definitely need salt.

I’m sharing my recipe on The Gluten-Free Homemaker’s Gluten-Free Wednesdays.