chicken – The Romance Factor

I’m not usually one to experiment in the kitchen, but this past weekend, I got creative. By “creative,” I mean I got desperate to use up some of the things we had in the kitchen to make dinner and avoid delivery or fast food. Even though we go through phases where we cook all the time, we also go through phases where we don’t. Right now, we’re in convenience mode, which means way too much fast food, and it’s getting tiresome.

I need to go shopping and I’ve been procrastinating doing a meal plan and grocery list. In honor of procrastinating even longer, I decided to see if I could hodge podge something together with what we had in the house. The crock pot is pretty much the best invention for this sort of lazy cooking, and I love it. I love everything about it. I like it better when we have liners, because then clean up is easy too.

I was surprised with how well this turned out, and I wanted to go ahead and share it for those looking for an easy recipe. I’m sure it mimics many other recipes out there, but it never hurts to add another variation to the pile, right?

Ingredients:
Boneless chicken breasts (we used chicken tenderloin)
1 can of Campbell’s Fiesta Cheese Soup
1 can of tomatoes and peppers (Rotel would be good for this)
1 can of black beans
Chili powder
Garlic salt
Pepper
Shredded cheddar cheese
Tortilla chips

Directions:
Throw the chicken in the crock pot.
Season with the seasonings of your choice (I listed the ones I used above).
Pour the cheese soup over the chicken, followed by the black beans (undrained), followed by the tomatoes (undrained). To be honest, you could pour these ingredients in any order you want. The goal is just to get them in there and covering that chicken.
Put the lid on and let cook for 7-8 hours.
Top with cheese and eat over nacho chips (if desired).

We stirred this dish periodically throughout the day, but I don’t think we needed to…it’s just how we roll. About halfway through the cooking time, I was a little worried that it was going to be too watery, but by the time we were ready to eat, it was the perfect consistency and was really good over nacho chips…sort of a chicken chili nacho thing. We talked about some modifications for next time, just to change it up a bit (sour cream, more cheese soup, mexicorn), but the truth is, this recipe as is was delicious. I don’t even like black beans, but they were super tasty in this meal.

This one is going on our menu rotation, and even though it was super simple, being that it was an experiment, I feel proud that it tasted as good as it did.

Rotisserie chicken is one of the tastiest things ever, and I’d heard that it’s great for recipes. I decided to see if it lived up to the hype this past week. During our regular shopping trip, we stopped at Dillon’s and picked up a chicken for about five dollars, and I was the lucky one who pulled as much as I could off the bone. I’m okay with it…it beats touching raw chicken.

The rotisserie chicken didn’t yield as much meat as I thought it would, but it was still enough for about two meals. We were going to stretch it into three, but I think two meals in a row is going to be about right for us.

One of the recipes is something I named a Chicken Parmesan Bake, though I’m not sure if that’s accurate. I tweaked the Sour Cream Noodle Bake to add more pasta sauce, and I used the chicken instead of ground beef (in the future, I’m going to try this with italian sausage and ground pork).

For your recipe pleasure, here are the deets on this dish (sorry for the blurry bowl shot, as I failed at taking a finished product pic).

Chicken Parmesan Bake with Rotisserie Chicken
Ingredients

* Shredded Rotisserie chicken (2 cups? I just eyeballed it)
* Pasta sauce (1 jar)
* ½ teaspoon salt
* fresh ground black pepper
* 16 ounce package penne pasta
* ½ cup sour cream
* 1¼ cup small curd cottage cheese
* Parmesan cheese
* ¼ teaspoon onion powder
* garlic powder (eyeball it)
* 1 cup grated Mozzarella cheese

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Simmer chicken and pasta sauce in skillet, ½ teaspoon salt and plenty of fresh ground black pepper. Stir, then simmer while you prepare the other ingredients.
3. Cook pasta until al dente. Drain and set aside.
4. In a medium bowl, combine sour cream and cottage cheese. Add plenty of freshly ground black pepper (if using onion powder and garlic powder add it now) and parmesan cheese. Add to noodles and stir.
5. To assemble, add a third of the noodles to a 13″ x 9″ baking dish. Top with a third of the sauce mixture, then sprinkle on half the grated mozzarella. Repeat with noodle, meat, then a final layer of cheese. Bake for 20 minutes, or until all cheese is melted.

This was so good! The only change (besides trying different meat) I’ll make in the future is to add some minced garlic. Fresh garlic would be good too. I love lasagna, and this was an easy way to satisfy that craving.