Weeknight Shorts: Slow-Cooked Paprika Chicken and Potatoes

I love cooking. I love planning out meals and dishes and putting them together and sharing them with people I love. But sometimes, I just want dinner to make itself. And sometimes, I can get close to that:

This meal took 15 minutes to prepare. Well, it took more time than that, but it only took 15 minutes of my time to prepare. The heavy lifting was covered by my slow cooker while I ran errands, did grocery shopping, got laundry done, baked (while taking recipe notes and photographs), wrote about cooking, wrote about more cooking, picked my youngster up from school, listened patiently while she read her homework books to me, transformed a cork from a recent bottle of wine into a mouse, and brushed the dog. You know, the usual stuff. Sometimes there's desire and space and time for putting together a more involved meal in the midst of all that. And sometimes, there's a great opportunity to use a recipe like this one.

You could tweak a lot of the ingredients in this recipe. I was looking for something fast, yummy, and appealing to my cravings for comfort food that inevitably surface this time of the year. This combination of ingredients was on hand and fit that bill, so that's what became dinner. And it gave me the time and space to get things done. After all, there are Cheerios to toss to the dog.