52 in 52 # 30 Salsa chicken

Over the last few years, I have a new found love for making food for my family.  Before that, I was never a chef, by any means.  I was capable of making simple items like a grilled cheese or some boxed max and cheese but nothing that would have been considered from scratch or that contained more than a few ingredients.  Over time I became more and more interested in cooking.  Fortunately, for people like me, there are a million websites for beginning chefs who need even the most basic of assistance, and now there is Pinterest, which is a cook-in-training’s best friend.  Because of the internet, thousands of recipes are available to you in the click of a button. 

 

My sister pinned the original recipe for Salsa Chicken from Pinterest a while ago.  I never looked at it because the picture isn’t the most appealing photo that could have been taken of that recipe.  One day, I was bored with what we had for dinner options and decided to give it a try exactly as the recipe stated.  We absolutely loved it!  My sister said that they have served it over rice, in tortillas, or just alone with a side dish.  It is amazing with any of those options.  Our favorite way to serve it is over a homemade Spanish rice. 

 

Of course, because we are who we are, the subsequent times that we made this recipe we changed up the ingredients a bit.  Now that we have a different version we like it so much more.  This recipe originally called for sour cream to be added into it, but we changed that to cream cheese and we love that addition.  It gives the dish a creaminess that fools your body into thinking that it is super cheesy without all of the added calories of putting cheese into the dish on top of the sour cream.  We also add more than double the salsa that it calls for.  We love spicy things and if Grace wasn’t eating with us and if the babies toddlers weren’t eating out of our bowls, we would probably make it spicier.  What makes this recipe even better is that it cooks in the crock pot and is completely a ‘set it and forget it’ style meal.  This recipe is very simple and easy to assemble. 

  

Salsa Chicken

Prep Time: 10 mins

Cook Time: 4 hours

 

2 frozen chicken breasts

1 can reduced fat Cream of Chicken Soup

2 cups your favorite salsa

3 ounces fat free cream cheese

3 Tbsp Homemade Taco Seasoning**

1 can black beans

 

**Refer to this post here, if you have not made your homemade Taco Seasoning.  If you don’t intend to do that, you would substitute an entire pouch of Taco Seasoning from the store in this recipe.

 

Place 2 frozen chicken breasts in the bottom of your crockpot.  Sprinkle taco seasoning evenly over frozen chicken.  Pour cream of chicken soup and salsa on top of chicken.  Do not stir.  Cook on high for 3.5 hours.  After 3.5 hours, remove lid, shred chicken, add can of black beans, and cream cheese and stir to combine.  You can either remove the chicken from the crock pot and shred outside of the container using whatever method of shredding chicken that you prefer, or you can use two forks and shred it while it’s still in the pot.  We have done it both ways and it yields a similar result both ways. 

 

Serve over rice, wrapped in tortillas, or on its own with a veggie or salad.  We have had it several different ways and I must admit that I love it served over rice.  You can easily substitute sour cream for cream cheese and you can use the full fat/calorie versions of all items as well but we are trying to make this as healthy as possible.  You can add more or less salsa depending on how spicy you like it.  The original recipe called for 1 cup of salsa and I don’t think that you should add any less than that for fear of it being too thick or losing some of its necessary flavor. 

 

Made as our recipe describes there are 302 calories in a 1 cup serving.  This will make approximately 6 servings of 1 cup each.  This is very filling and using our Spanish rice recipe makes the total calorie count still appropriate for a calorie conscious dinner and it is very filling. 

 

Try it out and let me know if you make any substitutions as I am always looking forward to trying new variations of my favorite recipes. 

 

Enjoy!

 

-Sara

 

 

 

Monthly Meal Planning - September

I like meal planning.  It gives my type A, list-making personality something to smile about.  I try to help my family stick to a meal plan/meal budget, but we can all do better.  For me, going to the grocery store weekly for a more frequent meal plan is the quick way to financial disaster.  Even at Aldi, there are times when I get out of there $30 over the budget that I came in with.   I got inspired by an awesome woman named Julie (mammaneedsanap) that I follow on Youtube who meal plans by the month, and I am going to give that a go for September. 

Luckily, Corry and I have been stocking up and keeping certain ingredients on hand for months now of foods that we favor, so the shopping trip for this month is not as massive as it would be if we were starting from scratch.  It is not a lie to say that thinking about spending a bulk of our grocery budget in one trip at the beginning of the month is a bit daunting.  I understand that we will still need to shop weekly or so in very small doses for things like milk and our CSA produce, but the vast majority will be purchased in this one day.  I decided to play it safe and stick with mostly meals that we have made before for this first month, however I did throw in a few meals that we have not had previously to test a few new recipes. 

I am not changing the way that I meal plan/build a shopping list/etc; I am just planning for more meals upfront.  I will include recipe links when I have them and will do recipe posts on the ones that I don't have yet.  I will also keep up the practice of not planning a specific meal for a specific day unless we have produce that is going to spoil soon, etc.  We are less likely to stick to a plan, for some reason, if we are "forced" to have a certain food on a certain day. 

Here are our meals for the month:

Salsa Chicken & Spanish Rice x 3
Breakfast Casserole
Grilled Steak & Chicken, grilled sweet corn & fruit salad x 2
Chicken Chili x 2
Spaghetti x 3
Tuna Salad (kids will have something else not decided upon yet) x 2
Baked tacos x 3
Pulled Pork & side dish
Spinach, Alfredo, & turkey pepperoni pizzas
Grilled chicken salads
Sandwich & Homemade Soup (cream of chicken with wild rice & chicken noodle) x 2
Chicken Spaghetti x 2
Red Beans & Rice
BBQ Chicken Sandwiches

I need 28 dinners total for the month of September.  This is technically 25, but I gave us three dinners eating out in case we are out later than expected or feel like a treat.  Most of these recipes are 'diet' and I will include the nutritional info on them in the recipe post if I have it.  If not, I will include the portion(s) that we are having so you can get a general idea.  I need to shop at three different stores to get all of the items that we need - Target, Aldi, and Walmart or Albertsons.  Target's shopping trip was a bit distracted because of diapers, a new skirt for Grace and a few other random items but we did manage to get $10 worth of grocery items.  Aldi was where I spent the bulk of our money and it amounted to $111 and some change, which wasn't bad considering that consisted of a large volume of meat.  I still need a buy 2 items from the list that they don't sell at Aldi and they didn't have for some reason at Target.  All in all, our budget this month for groceries should be less than $200, which is pretty good for a family of five.  Next month that will change because we won't have as many items on hand and we will have a different menu (hopefully).   

Have you ever done a monthly meal plan?  What did or did you not like about it?