Chicken Enchilada Chili

Mark and I attend a Bible study on Sunday evenings on Max Lucado's series - Fearless. The study is a 6-week series, and tomorrow night (a night later than planned) is our final evening. At our last study, we decided to do a "soup night", and meet a little earlier at 6pm.

I was thinking through soup recipes I had in store oO(chicken tortilla, chili, potato, creamy butternut squash), but decided to try a new one: Chicken Enchilada!

I scoured my recipe box and all my recipe books looking for the recipe I had misplaced, and came up short. So I went to the web, and upon my first google search came across a recipe with the exact same ingredients that I recalled, so I went with it. Thank you Stephanie O'Dea of CrockPot365 blog for this great recipe!

disclaimer: I apologize in advance that I didn't take any pictures of this recipe, but hey - give a girl a break - I had to send in my lens for repair, so all I have is my super close-up 55-200mm lens, and it's tough to get good shots up close from so far away.

This was one of the easier recipes I've made with shredded chicken, so I was pretty stoked about that! Basically, I just threw all the ingredients in the crockpot and stirred them together.

Ingredients:
1 lg can enchilada sauce
1 lg can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 lg can diced tomatoes
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 medium onion, diced
2 tsp chili powder (or more)
1 tsp cumin
2 lg chicken breasts, poached (a.k.a. boiled) for 20 minutes with bay leaves

I'll have to comment on how it turned out, but for now, it's sitting in my crockpot liner in the fridge. But wowza does it smell good even now, and looks delicious!

RAVE - "Clean"? Alfredo Sauce

If you weren't aware, in the past 6 weeks, I've done 2 bouts of a special 10-Day Cleanse program that my good buddy, Beth Young, put me (and some other ladies) up to. In those 20 days (separated by a good 3 weeks), I've dropped 9lbs, and feel pretty great! The struggle, however, has been trying to find recipes to make that don't taste like "clean" recipes.

I'm ecstatic to have found a great blog with lots of great recipes for "clean" stuff! I found this particular recipe while searching for a great, "clean", healthy alfredo sauce. I know you're thinking, "Humdawg, you're delusional - alfredo is in no way, shape or form 'clean'", and you're right! But this...this is!

So here is this incredible recipe, thanks to Tiffany from www.thegraciouspantry.com. Of course, I modified it to use ingredients I normally have on hand (basil, fresh garlic).

Ingredients:

1 lg container cottage cheese * (she recommends 4C)
1/2 C Kraft parmesan and romano cheese *
I did not add the milk or garlic powder as Tiffany did.
I did add chopped fresh basil and minced garlic to taste.


*I was supposed to use the organic kind, but I'll admit that my small-town grocery store didn't carry any, so I bought the non-organic stuff, which makes the recipe a little less "clean".

Directions:

You combine all the ingredients in a double-boiler (or in my case, a metal bowl on top of a pot of boiling water, and let it all melt together, using a hand-mixer to diminish the cottage cheese chunks. You can't let it heat too fast or the cottage cheese will separate, which would be gross. I think had I added the milk, it might not have been quite so stringy when I blended it, but it was INCREDIBLE, and reheated just fine as well.

I poured this over some penne pasta with grilled chicken sauteed with mushrooms, onions and broccoli. It was better than any entree I've had at Olive Garden - better than any alfredo sauce I've had that I can recall, and it's BETTER for you than any alfredo sauce too!

I apologize, yet again, for the lack of pictures, but the good news is they are working on my lens!! Hopefully it will be back soon!

Apple Chicken Stew

A few months ago, my buddy Ang told me about this great recipe she found on Allrecipes.com for Apple Chicken Stew. I'm always a sucker for combining fruit and meat, but Mark is always a little more unsure about it. This one sounded a little more minimum on the fruity, sweet taste, so I decided to try it out after the Toro Employee Sale this morning.

So here's the recipe, with hats off to Carol Mathias from Lincoln, NE for posting the recipe on AllRecipes.com.

The Ingredients

I'm going to start out by separating the ingredients into 5 categories (and 6 steps): The veggies, the meat, the fruit, the spices and the sauce

The Veggies

You combine all the following in the crockpot: cubed potatoes, sliced carrots, sliced celery and sliced red onion.

The Spices

Combine the salt, pepper, thyme and caraway seed. Sprinkle half over the veggies.

The Meat

Cook the chicken in the olive oil...

...then put the cooked chicken over the veggies in the crockpot.

The Fruit

Put the peeled, diced apple over the meat in the crockpot.

The Sauce

Combine the apple cider and cider vinegar, then pour over everything in the crockpot.

Yeah, I failed to take a "finished product" pic, or a pic for this step. Ooops!

The Spices (again)

Sprinkle the rest of the spices over everything in the crockpot. Add the bay leaf.

Turn the crockpot to cook on high for 4 hours.

Eat it :)