Slow Cooker Chicken Cacciatore Recipe

Slow cooked meals are easy and delicious. Meat becomes fall-apart tender, there's no need to add fats or oils, and preparation is minimal.

If you are new to slow-cookers, there are a couple of slow-cooking tips and tricks just below the recipe, and I've added some interesting health and nutrition information too.

'Cacciatore' is Italian for 'hunter', and this is a simple tomato and chicken version with onions, herbs and spices.

These are a few things I've discovered about using slow cookers:

Herbs and spices – herbs and spices can become bitter, or their flavours can be lost entirely when cooked for a long time, so add them to the slow cooker about one or two hours before the end of the cooking time.

Thickening – slow cooked sauces don't thicken in the way that stovetop stews or oven casseroles do, and liquids don't reduce. Rolling the meat in flour before adding it to the pot helps, and only adding enough liquid to make sure that the ingredients cook without catching and burning.

Do Not Disturb. Unless you need to add more liquid or more ingredients at different stages of cooking, leave the lid in place – otherwise heat will escape. Checking and stirring doesn't make much difference to other forms of cooking, but slow cookers take a long time to build up heat, so taking the lid off can dramatically lower the temperature inside the pot.

Chicken thighs have plenty of B3 and B6-vitamins, tryptophan, selenium and protein, and part of your recommended daily iron intake. Chicken soup has been shown to help boost the immune system and perhaps get rid of colds more quickly. Because this cacciatore recipe is cooked slowly allowing all the micronutrients from the chicken thighs to infuse the cooking liquid, I can't see any reason why it shouldn't have the same properties as traditional chicken soup.

Herbs and spices – Rosemary and thyme proportionally contain a lot of iron – it's in non-heme form so it needs a bit of help from vitamin C and/or heme iron to be absorbed by the body. The tomatoes in this recipe provide the vitamin C, and the chicken provides the heme iron, so you'll be getting the most out of this dish if you need a little iron boost.

Colds, flu and infections – as well as chicken's possible role in clearing a cold more quickly, lots of herbs and spices have antimicrobial or immune-boosting properties that might be able to prevent or help get rid of minor infections. Rosemary, thyme, oregano, turmeric, black pepper and many others have been traditionally used as culinary 'medicine', and research is beginning to show that herbs and spices really do have a mild but appreciable beneficial effect, so add a pinch or two of your favourites to ward off winter chills or summer colds.