Cheesy Chipotle Chicken and Rice

I promise that I really do cook things other than chicken and meals that are a little more fancy pants, but for some reason I only remember to take pictures of quick, chicken meals. Oh, well.

Tonight, we were going to have stuffed cabbage rolls! That is until I took a marathon nap and read the recipe when I woke up and realized that they have to cook for 2 hours, which at that point meant that we would have eaten at 8:30. So, we had to turn to Plan B. Luckily, I had almost everything for this recipe from Yammie's Noshery for Cheesy Chipotle Chicken and Rice. I did have to adjust some things, because I was missing a couple of ingredients.

The original recipe calls for black beans, but shockingly I didn't have any! Luckily, the rice we cook at home has beans and barley mixed in it so I used that and it worked out great. I also didn't find chipotle seasoning, so I added some Mexican seasoning and a little cayenne pepper and I thought it worked well. I mixed the cheese and sour cream right in with the rice. I kind of love one pot recipes like this. I guess I used two: one to boil chicken and one for the rice. I also didn't have a red bell pepper, but I had a bag of small sweet peppers so I chopped up a few of those and they were delicious.

We ate ours with some tortilla chips. The kids and my husband all loved it. Our 11 month old son ate two bowls of it. If you want you can add some hot sauce on top. I think it would work well as a side dish to fajitas or tacos or even as a dip. It was definitely not the fanciest of meals, but was a really good lazy Sunday dinner.

My picture leaves a lot to be desired...again: lazy Sunday! So, I didn't plate it nicely or sprinkle cilantro on top. Go to Yammie's Noshery for pretty pictures.

Try it out! Don't be dissuaded by my less than impressive picture!

Creamy Italian Chicken

Some days when I've spent the day cleaning the kitchen - removing all those fingerprints from my appliances, the crusty things on the underside of the chairs, swept and mopped the floor - the last thing I want to do is make a meal.  Unfortunately, those rotten kids want dinner every night!  So, I have a couple of stand-by meals that are easy both in preparation and in clean up.  A favorite amongst my children is Italian Chicken.  This is a recipe that I've gotten from my Fix and Forget cookbook.  The thing I love about this meal is that it's a Crockpot meal that doesn't take 8 hours.  I personally like to add Sriracha sauce to the top of mine only, because it lacks the spice I like in all of my food, but the rest of the family likes it as is.

Ingredients:

3-4 Chicken Breasts

Robusto Italian Dressing packet (dry mix)

2 packages of cream cheese (I have cut this down to 1 1/2)

2 cans of Cream of Chicken soup

1/2 Cup of water

Instructions:

1.  Slice chicken breast horizontally first, and then cube.  If your chicken breasts aren't very thick, you can increase the number of chicken breasts that you use.  If mine are on the smallish side, I usually will use one breast per member of my family.

2.  Place cubed chicken into the bottom of your Crockpot.

3.  Mix Italian Seasoning and water and then pour over chicken

4.  Cook on High for 1 1/2 hours or on Low for 3 hours

5.  Mix together soup and cream cheese and pour on top of the Chicken.  I have in the past not mixed the two together, and just put them in separately, and the cream cheese never seems to melt down completely.  You can add the cream cheese, let that melt down a bit, and then add the soup (sometimes you just don't want to clean that mixer!)

6.  Cook for an additional 30 minutes and serve over rice or egg noodles.

Serves 6 - three of them boys that really devour everything insight!

Enjoy!

We had ours with peas tonight, but I have found that this meal is a little on the heavy side, so a nice garden salad sometimes is nice.