Recipe: Easy Crockpot Mexican Chicken

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.

A.

Rotisserie Chicken and Parmesan Bake

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).

Hot, delicious, mess!

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.

A.

Recipe: Tuna Noodle Casserole

This past week was a banner week in our household. I cooked dinner twice!

Even better than the sour cream noodle bake was the tuna noodle casserole I made on Tuesday night. I love TNC. It was one of my favorites when I was a kid, but I’ve only had it a handful of times as an adult. In my normal aversion to cooking, I always thought the dish was too complicated. So many ingredients, so much to do, so much kitchen drama!

That’s not the case. This was easy to make, and while I wasn’t as super suave in the kitchen as I had been with the first casserole, I still managed to put it all together without setting anything on fire. I used bits and pieces of old recipes I’d been given to hodge podge this together. Now it’s probably going to be one of my go-to recipes.

Under that layer of chips is cheesy tuna goodness.

Tuna Noodle Casserole
Ingredients
6 ounces egg noodles
2 tablespoons butter
1 (10 3/4 ounce) can condensed cream of mushroom soup, undiluted
1/2-1 teaspoon garlic powder (or to taste, I use 1 teaspoon)
3 -4 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup sour cream
1/4-1/2 teaspoon seasoning salt
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper (or to taste)
onion powder
1 (6 1/2 ounce) can tuna, drained and flaked
Shredded cheddar cheese
Potato chips

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Grease a 2-quart casserole dish.

2. Cook the egg noodles in boiling water; drain and toss with 2 tablespoons butter.

3. In a sauce pan, mix together undiluted mushroom soup, garlic powder, Parmesan cheese, milk, sour cream, salt, pepper, and onion powder. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently for 15 minutes.

4. Stir in tuna to sauce mix.

5. Combine the mixture with the cooked egg noodles.

6. Pour everything into casserole dish.

7. Sprinkle the top with shredded cheddar cheese, then with crushed potato chips

8. Bake for about 25 minutes.

I was surprised at how easy this was and how delicious it tasted. Jon likes his things spiced up, so he added hot sauce to his. The recipe is versatile, so you can add whatever spices or sauces you want to give it some kick.

This coming Sunday I’m trying two recipes: crockpot cheeseburgers and crockpot dump cake. Wish me luck!

A.

Recipe: Sour Cream Noodle Bake

Any time I actually make dinner, it’s a pretty big event. Being in the kitchen makes me uncomfortable. I don’t multi-task around hot items well, and I don’t have the flair for seasoning and eyeballing amounts like Jon does. Therefore, he does pretty much all the cooking (even though I’m in charge of finding new recipes).

I pinned this recipe to my meal board awhile back (the original one from the Pioneer Woman can be found here). It looked easy enough, so I gave it a shot with a couple minor changes. The information below includes my changes, so refer to the links for the full, original recipe.

Sour Cream Noodle Bake

Ingredients (I was able to pick up everything at Aldi, which is the cheapest grocery store in our area)

• roll of ground turkey
• 2 8 oz cans Tomato Sauce
• Salt
• Pepper
• Egg Noodles (I cooked a whole 16 oz bag. It made alot. Half the bag would have been fine)
• 1/2 cup Sour Cream
• 1-1/4 cup Small Curd Cottage Cheese
• Shredded Sharp Cheddar Cheese

Preparation Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Brown ground turkey in a large skillet. Drain fat (my turkey was lean, so I skipped this step), then add tomato sauce and season with salt and pepper. Stir, then simmer while you prepare the other ingredients.

Cook egg noodles until al dente. Drain and set aside.

In a medium bowl, combine sour cream and cottage cheese. Add pepper. Add to noodles and stir.

To assemble, add half of the noodles to a baking dish. Top with half the meat mixture, then sprinkle on some cheese. Repeat with noodles, meat, then a final layer of cheese. Bake for 20 minutes, or until all cheese is melted.

My food pics never look as pretty as the originals, but the food tasted good anyway!

The original recipe says to pair with some bread, but I figured the noodles would be starchy enough. Though they are egg noodles. Still a starch, right? I don’t know. The meal was really filling without the bread.

Next time I’ll even out the noodle to sauce ratio by using only half a bag of noodles as instructed. Even with that little oversight, this turned out really well. I’m proud! Also, I managed to keep all kitchen anxiety at bay. I took my time, managed to do a few things at once, and even (sort of) cleaned up as I went.

My next mission? Tuna noodle casserole.

A.

Passing Batons and Making Dinner

We started the day off with my final Tengaicon meeting, or at least my final one as chair. This was our wrap-up meeting to talk about what went well and how the committee is going to move forward for next year. Because our (meaning mine and Jon’s) plans are so up in the air for this coming year, I knew it wasn’t fair to start something and then have to dump it onto someone else later. So we chose a new chair, one of the guys who’s done it in the past, and I made my formal resignation.

It’s kind of bittersweet. I liked planning the convention and was really happy with how it turned out, though there was a degree of stress in heading it up. I was a little sad to give up my position, but I was also a little relieved too. I think we built a strong foundation and I’m hoping that no matter where I am next year, I can come back and attend the con as both a gamer and maybe a volunteer.

Our original plan was to do laundry and geocache in town while we waited for our Pathfinder game to start. However, the game ended up being cancelled, so we decided to curb our plans to get some chill time in at home. Though we made it to the laundromat, we ended up deciding to wait for our normal laundry day of Monday to do clothes.  We went up to my work and hid “the body” for this week’s office murder mystery (which I’m pretty excited about), then went shopping at Aldi for groceries for the coming week.

We’ve been spending more money on eating out, and we’re back into “tightening the budget” mode to prepare for our trip to St. Louis and our end of the year plans. This week we’re planning on eating at home more and either taking our lunches or sticking to value menu sandwiches (which I think I have to do one day while I delivery laundry and run errands).  This plan always takes us to Aldi because food there is pretty cheap.

Though I’m not much of a cook and leave most of the kitchen responsibilities to Jon, I decided to make Maple Barbecue Beef from the recipe I got from Stephanie O’Dea’s blog.  I didn’t have any frostbitten meat, so we bought fresh stew meat. I also went with maple pancake syrup rather than true maple syrup.

Fuzzy picture of dinner fixins.

We paired it with cheesy biscuits from a mix that Forsh bought me, a copy cat mix of the ones they serve at Red Lobster.

 

This was so good! Probably had way more of the beef than I needed, but I wasn’t too full when I was done. I think we’re going to be making this again because it’s super easy and tasty. Next time I think we’re going to put it over rice though.

We finished watching Season 5 of Parks and Rec, and I’m debating watching a horror movie tonight. I was going to get some knitting done, but I’m feeling kind of lazy tonight. I will probably work on a few cache puzzles, then shower and turn in early for the new week tomorrow.

Here’s to hoping everyone has a fabulous Monday!

A.