Chicken and vegetable stew, sometimes with dumplings

M likes it when I write out an approximate recipe for the things I've cooked that he likes eating. I suppose it makes more sense to me now that he's home all the time, and I still travel like crazy. This can be made with a bag of frozen veggies (if it's cleaning out the freezer time, or the budget is running thin) or whatever fresh veggies you find at the grocery. I prefer fresh to frozen all the time, so this is a late summer food to me.

Leave the veggies in nice, discrete chunks. It's always nice to get a big colorful bowl of veggies peeking through the sauce. This is a recipe my mom taught me and my brother before we both left home, but it's probably changed a bit in the intervening years.

Recipe for the 8qt stockpot again. We were shooting for enough leftovers to last a few dinners into the week.

2 medium onions, large dice
2 carrots, cleaned, quartered and cut into 1/4" pieces
3 ears of white corn, cut off the cobb
4 medium red potatoes, 1/2" chunks
4 cloves of garlic, sliced
~25 white button mushrooms, cleaned and sliced in 1/4" sections
1lb green beans, cleaned and cut in 1" sections
2 boneless chicken thighs
2 cans Campbells cream of mushroom soup (condensed)
1 soup can of milk
1 soup can of water
2 Tbsp olive oil
Black pepper

Add oil to bottom of pan and begin warming. Cut up onions and add to pan. Stir occasionally while chopping other veggies. By the time you get to the green beans, the onion should have cooked down and started to go translucent. Carrots are next, followed by mushrooms, green beans, then corn, then potatoes, and finally garlic. Stir in the two cans of condense soup until all the veggies are coated. Add the soup can of water and the soup can of milk. Pepper to taste.

Cut up the chicken thighs into bite sized pieces. Dark meat works better for this than white meat, and is often cheaper too. I buy a big family pack when it goes on sale, and it'll yield the meat for four or five of these dishes (which turns out to be ~$1.50 in chicken per giant stockpot). If your family likes more meat, you'll have to cut back on the veggies a bit to make room. Happily, M eats his vegetables with gusto!

Cook everything, stirring occasionally, until the chicken cooks through and the potatoes are done. Because there's a lot of dairy in the pot, you'll want to avoid a roiling boil, but simmering or a slow boil is fine. If you elect to make dumplings, mix up some Bisquick batter and drop large clumps of it in on top of the stew. Cover and allow the dumplings to steam while the soup finishes. I usually skip the dumplings, but they're good filler for extending the meal for more people (or unexpected dinner guests).

Start to finish the whole thing takes me about an hour, including all the prepwork. If your knife skills are rusty or slow, expect it to take longer. If you use frozen veggies, consider putting them in later in the cook time (after the potatoes, onions and chicken have some time to cook down), or they'll go all mushy.