Today was a beautifully chilly day. I don't even want to talk about the fact that it is supposed to be 81° on Monday.. Let's just pretend that's not going to happen.
I am a sucker for soup on a chilly day. Especially homemade soup that's been cooking away in the crock pot, filling my home with delicious smells.
One of my faaavorite soups is Chicken Tortilla Soup. Which is, as I'm sure you've figured out, NOT keto friendly.
Well, it is now! And I think I might just like this version even better.
I wasn't sure if it was going to work out in real life the way it did in my head, but it totally did!
Don't you just love when that happens?! I know I sure do!
And it came together like a dream. So so soooo easy. The end result is perfectly creamy, not gritty or grainy, which I'm guessing is from adding the cream cheese and cream in towards the end. It's cheesy without being overwhelming or salty. Did I mention it's super filling, too? Yessssssss.
You need:
1 lb boneless skinless chicken breast
1 tsp Chili Powder
1 tsp Paprika
1 tsp Garlic Powder
1/2 tsp Ground Cumin
2 cups chicken broth
8 oz low carb salsa (I used Paul Newman's)
6 oz Cream Cheese, cubed
3/4 cup Heavy Whipping Cream
1/2 cup shredded Pepper Jack Cheese
1/2 cup shredded Mexican Blend cheese
Throw your chicken into the crockpot. Season with all of the seasonings and add the chicken broth and salsa. Cover and cook on low for 4 hours.
After 4 hours, shred the chicken and put it back into the crockpot. Add the cream cheese, heavy whipping cream, and cheeses. Stir well, cover and put crockpot on low for one more hour.
Serve it up and savor every bite!
That's it! I topped mine with (low carb) tortilla strips that I baked up in the oven and a little extra pepper Jack cheese on top.
This is a perfect hearty meal for any chilly evening. I already can't wait to enjoy the leftovers tomorrow!
I hope you love this as much as my family and I did tonight. What's your favorite chilly weather keto soup?
Ok, maybe not hard at work, cuz really, I love working in the kitchen. There is nothing like watching people enjoy a meal that I've put together with my own two hands.. Seriously, it brings so much joy to my heart!
I've been experimenting a lot in the kitchen lately, trying to make more of my family's favorite comfort meals into low carb/ keto comfort meals. That's not always the easiest thing to do. The other day, I managed to perfect my Cheesy White Enchilada Sauce, which I was so excited about. But how would it all taste together?
So I set to work and got my hands dirty, working on my Easy Cheesy White Chicken Enchiladas.
And it was so so SO worth it. They came out absolutely delicious and so very filling. My family absolutely raved over them. And that is a major win in my book!
It is so super simple, and so ridiculously yummy.
You need:
1 to 2 lbs of boneless skinless chicken breast or thighs (depends on how many people you are trying to feed. I used about a pound and half, which made enough enchiladas to feed 4 of us with some left AND some chicken leftover to use in another new recipe that's coming soon!)
Throw your chicken into a crock pot with the seasonings and the 1/2 cup of water. Cook on low for 4 to 6 hours. (All crock pots cook differently. Yours may take more or less time)
Whip up your sauce using recipe linked above. You can make this sauce a day or two in advance if you need to! Just heat it up and stir it well when you're ready to use it!
When chicken is done, preheat your oven to 375° and spray a baking dish with nonstick spray. Spread a liiiittle bit of your enchilada sauce on the bottom of the baking dish. Not a lot, just enough to help keep the bottoms from getting too crispy.
Place the chicken into a large bowl and shred it. Add 1 cup of the Monterey Jack cheese to the chicken and mix it up.
Take some Chicken/ cheese mixture and place it on top of a tortilla. Roll it up nice and tight and place it, seam side down, into the baking dish. Repeat till you've used all your tortillas
Pour your Enchilada sauce on top of the rolled up tortillas and top with remaining cup of Monterey Jack Cheese.
Pop into the oven for 15 minutes, til cheese is all melted and bubbly.
Serve it up and enjoy!!!
So incredibly simple and tasty, right?! This will most definitely be going into regular rotation at my house.
You simply must try this! Don't forget to come on back and let me know what you think! I love comments. 😉😘
A while back, I posted a recipe for my Easy Cheesy White Chicken Enchiladas. They were delicious. (Tho the pictures from back then were terrible. Please don't judge me! 😂)
Then I started keto and realized I couldn't really have those anymore. So I set to work on making a low carb bake version, minus the tortillas. It turned out delicious and was filling, but it still wasn't quite the same without the tortillas!
Then one day I got a notification through Instagram that happy_lowcarb_mom had remade them using cutdacarb flatbread. How freaking genius is that?!? I had never even thought about using low carb wraps or tortillas. DUH! Hers seriously looked AHMAZING.
So I decided to use some low carb tortillas in place of the carb heavy ones and whipped up a batch using my low carb bake recipe. Turned out great. Even my nineteen year old carb obsessed son loved them. (Have I mentioned that I got him on board with keto?? Yup! Score!!)
Anyways, the other night I was thinking about how I wanted to try and simplify the sauce. I was a bit hesitant to attempt it cuz it was already so good and I didn't want to waste ingredients cuz, hello, we are broke more often than not! But the little voice inside my stomach urged me to try anyways.
Why are you looking at me that way? Doesn't everyone have a little voice inside their stomach?
Folks, I am SO happy that I listened to that voice cuz HO...LY... YUM!!! It takes more simple ingredients, it cooks up quicker, and... I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but it tastes even better!
Ok, enough story telling. Let's get to the whole reason you came here, shall we?
You need:
1/2 stick of butter (so 4 Tbsp)
1 Tbsp cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
Sprinkle of salt and pepper
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 cup of grated parmesan cheese
1/2 cup shredded Monterey Jack Cheese
1 small can diced green chilies
In a medium to large saucepan, melt your butter over medium heat. Add your cream cheese and whisk like crazy till it is fully mixed in. It looks a little weird, but don't worry!
Slowly whisk in your chicken broth and then slowly whisk in your heavy cream.
Add in your salt, pepper, garlic powder and paprika. Whisk well.
Add your parmesan and Monterey jack and whisk again.
Let it simmer for just a couple minutes to thicken it up. Whisk it again, turn off the heat, and stir in your diced green chilies.
That's it. How easy was that?! Use it however you want it. I'm definitely going to be throwing it over some Chicken enchiladas using low carb tortillas. I cannot wait!
This recipe doubles beautifully, too, in case you want to make a bigger batch. I would double everything except the chilies.. tho that's just me. I suppose you totally could double those, too..
If you try this, please come on back and comment. I'd love to know what you think!
I swear, this has been the longest week ever! And it's only Wednesday. Say whaaaat?!
Luckily, I ran into some pretty great sales again last week, so we ate pretty well this week. Does anyone else get SUPER excited over finding great grocery sales? Please tell me it's not just me..
Welcome to another edition of What I Ate Wednesday: Keto Edition. Some of our favorite foods from this week were:
Bacon Cheeseburgers (and dogs) on top of salad and topped with pico.
Wings. Alllll the wiiiiings! That "breading"? It's seriously just parmesan cheese and seasoning/ spices. So freaking yummy!
I still had a third of a pork loin from the killer pork sale I caught last week, so I cut it into chops and topped them with parmesan and seasonings and a squirt of fresh lemon and baked them. They were AHHHH-MAZING! So moist and delicious.
I also threw together a quick deconstructed lasagna.. which is basically a lasagna minus the noodles. And ya know what? I didn't even miss the noodles. (The Italian in me is shaking her head in disbelief. Lol)
Still not sure what I'm going to put on the menu for this week yet.. Payday is on Thursday and no two checks are ever the same, so there's no telling what we have to work with until that day. Thursday is also grocery shopping day, so it's a day of looking through the sale ads of my favorite stores to figure out where I'm going to score the best deals, and then getting all the shopping done.
I swear, by the time I'm done doing all that, dropping my daughter off at practice, and putting all the groceries away, it's always tempting to just order a pizza for dinner. LOL Tho luckily (and also unluckily) after grocery shopping, we usually have little to no wiggle room in the budget for the rest of the week. Which means no pizza. 😂
I still can't see pics from that time without vividly remembering it like it was yesterday and crying every bit as hard..
(I did not create this video or song. Found on YouTube.)
At 20 years old, it was the first time that my eyes were fully opened to what a dark place the world could be. But I also got to see how unified our country could be, in the days that followed. I still get goosebumps thinking about that part.. My, how far we've fallen since then. How far this country has divided and drifted apart. And it's not because of politics. We've turned our backs on what is most important in this world, in LIFE, to focus on things that don't matter.
When I was a kid, I could never understand how adults could remember where they were and exactly what they were doing on significant days in history.. Until that day. I can still tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing, what my daddy was doing, even what my sweet then 2 year old Michael and I were wearing. I'll never forget... I don't think any of us will..
Every year on this day, I click a link like this one and I wonder if this will be the year that I can look at the pictures in them and not sob. And every year thus far, I haven't been able to. I honestly don't think I ever will be able to.
I remember waking up and rolling over next to my sleeping Michael, who was 2 years old at the time and snuggled up on me. I glanced at the TV and was overcome with fear and doubt. I remember looking at his sweet innocent little face and wondering what the hell kind of cruel world I had brought him into. I ran my hand over his hair, kissed his forehead, slowly pulled my arm from under his head and went into the living room to see my dad. He was already up and at the kitchen table prepping a sure to be delicious breakfast.
I asked if he knew what was going on and he told me a plane had accidentally hit one of the towers. Suddenly I saw the second plane hit and I shouted for him. He told me they were just replaying the footage. I told him "No! LOOK!"
As he realized what had actually happened, and as we watched the towers fall.. the look on his face... I will NEVER forget that look for as long as I live. I can still see it now, as if he were right in front of me. I knew it was baaaad because my daddy was shaken and my Superman didn't shake easily. We sat and watched all morning in silence and disbelief.. I remember saying something about stuff falling from the tower windows and my dad telling me "those are people jumping, hun".. you can't ever unsee something like that. It's etched in your brain forever.
I was one of the lucky ones that didn't lose a loved one that day. But still I mourn(ed) deeply. I stopped on my way to work the next morning and bought every red, white, and blue carnation I could find. As I left the store, the gas station, and even outside of my work, I stood and handed them out to strangers. Some smiled. Some cried. Some hugged me. Some prayed with me. I'll NEVER forget those moments.
The rest of that day (and the days that followed), I remember the fear, the disbelief, the sadness.. I had never seen so many people shaken. No one was immune to it. A whole Nation torn..
But what rose from that was one of the most AMAZING things I've felt in all my years. Love. Hope. Strength. Unity. Pride. We, as a Nation, were truly ONE. You could FEEL all of those things in the air just buzzing around you. So real, I was convinced I could reach out and touch that feeling.
Strangers were helping each other. Strangers were smiling at each other. Can you imagine that? THAT is what this country needs to get back to! Screw color, screw gender, screw sexual orientation. We need to get back to LOVE... To UNITY... To ONE NATION, UNDER GOD. Because you know what? If we just get back to love, then color, gender, sexual orientation, etc, means nothing. Because where there is love, there is light. And when there is light, the darkness doesn't stand a chance...
Today, I pray for everyone who's life was affected in any way. For those that lost loved ones, for those brave men and women who ran in to help and will have those images forever ingrained in their memories, and for those like me that lost no one but still deeply mourn the day..
Let's get back to our TRUE greatness, America.
Smile at one another, even strangers, FOR NO REASON AT ALL other than to share and spread joy and love. Our country, our WORLD needs more of that.
Compliment each other.
Be there for each other.
Look out for one another.
Help those that need help. You never know when the shoe will be on the other foot and it will be you needing help.
Love one another.
Quit worrying about money, possessions, and status.. Those things mean NOTHING.
Focus on love and living your best soulful life.
That's the only way to truly make America great again.. It lies within each and every one of us. Let's make it happen.
I'm off to go snuggle my babies a little extra tight.
