Recipe #6 How-I-Bribed-My-Boyfriend-To-Decorate-for-7 Hours Chicken & Dumplings

It was chicken-y and dough-y and dumpling-y.  It was magnificent!

Christmas comes just once a year, and although I have been celebrating half-Christmas, I am usually chomping at the bit to get to the holiday season immediately after Halloween.  I start furtively listening to Christmas carols and lighting pine candles as soon as Trick-or-Treating ends.  My favorite part of the Christmas season is putting up the Christmas tree.  I held out as long as I could.  I really did.

I only made it until November 17.

Since I have managed to stuff 3 Christmas trees (one of which is 8 feet tall), 43 feet of garland and countless other decorations into my tiny apartment, I knew I could use help with the decorating—particularly the box-hauling, which is my least favorite part of decorating.

Enter my saint of a boyfriend, who not only volunteered to help me with all of this, but also agreed to haul boxes and unwrap ornaments with a smile on his face and a Santa hat on his head. 

Me with the hero of the hour!  

As a preemptive “thank you” for the help with the decorating, I made him chicken and dumplings.

It was amazing.  The recipe only calls for a few things too, so it was very inexpensive.  I only needed two chicken breasts, 2 cans of cream of chicken soup, some celery, butter, a bit of milk and refrigerated biscuit dough.  I added carrots too, since I had some on hand.

After chopping the celery and grating the carrots (and one knuckle), I dumped all but the biscuits into the crock pot and let it sit for about 6 hours. 

It was gorgeous, even if the carrots did cost me the first layer of skin on my  right, middle knuckle.

Then, about 30 minutes before serving, I just broke up a bunch of the biscuits and dumped them into the soup mixture.  In those thirty minutes, they turned into divine dumpling lumps.

It was delicious!  We ate a ton and still had leftovers to sustain us through our long 7 hour decorating day.

The house also looked amazing!