Failure to Success in 40 Minutes [Real Food]

It’s Thursday evening. The chicken has been cooking in one crockpot all day – the black beans in another. Tonight’s planned menu: chicken tacos.

D comes home and takes the baby. I head to the kitchen to finish up dinner. Look in the freezer for our whole wheat tortillas and discover they are multigrain. And filled with stuff I can’t pronounce. So I pull out the tortillas made out of a wheat/corn mixture and check the ingredients. Again, quite a few things I can’t pronounce. Crap. This is not a good sign.

I pull out the tortilla chips from the cabinet. Very few ingredients – corn, oil, and salt. But they are fried … and we think that would be cheating just a little. We can just eat chicken and beans. It’d might be good over some rice.

We open the top of crockpot #1 and discover the bottom is burned. I didn’t put any liquid in with the chicken … the recipe didn’t call for it. But I guess my salsa wasn’t liquidy enough. I put the top back on, walk out of the kitchen, pitch a mini fit and then head to the bedroom to refocus my thoughts.

I’ve got it! I say. We can make a soup. Never mind that it’s 80 degrees outside … tonight’s meal will be creatively recreated into tortilla soup.

So we head back to the kitchen and using a few different recipes create our own version of tortilla soup. And let me tell you … it was amazing. And it made so much soup we had not only had enough for lunch the next day, but were able to put some in the freezer for a rainy day. I might even be so bold to say that the recreated tortilla soup was much better than our plain chicken tacos would’ve been.

Here’s how we made it:

Leftover Chicken Tortilla Soup
Adapted from The Pioneer Woman

INGREDIENTS:
3 cups shredded cooked chicken
1 Tablespoon Olive Oil
1/2 onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped (it would also be delicious if you added a red bell pepper, but we didn’t have one of those)
3 cloves garlic, minced or chopped small
2-4 tsp taco seasoning (to taste)
14 ounces crushed tomatoes
1 small can diced green chiles
4 cups chicken broth (we make our own from whole chickens)
3 tablespoons tomato paste
4 cups water
2-3 cups black beans
2 tsp salt

DIRECTIONS:
Heat olive oil in a skillet. Saute onion, peppers, and garlic with taco seasoning over medium-high heat. Mix well, then add shredded chicken and stir.

Stir in tomatoes, chiles, chicken broth, tomato paste, water, black beans and salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. Taste it … and add more taco seasoning or salt if you think it needs it. Simmer for 40-50 minutes, uncovered.

When we ate it for lunch the next day, we ate homemade whole wheat pitas with it. Oh man … delish!