Oven Baked Chicken Tacos

So after I made the roasted lemon chicken (go back a few entries), I had a lot of chicken left over. Saturday night, I decided I was going to make some delicious chicken tacos. Now, in my household, tacos are what some people call "tacquitos". Rolled up corn tortillas that are either baked or fried (usually fried). Mexicans call them flautas, but whatever. Whatever it is that you call your tacos, these rolled up and baked vessels of deliciousness were very good.

Undressed taco deliciousness.

Oven Baked Cheesy Chicken Tacos

Pre-heat your oven to like.. I dunno, 400 degrees. That's what I went with because I was experimenting (I've never baked my tacos before, sooo). 

Now, tear up one of your chicken breasts into strips and bite size pieces and set aside in a bowl. 

In a saute pan, with a little bit of oil, sautee some chopped onion, diced green pepper, garlic, and salt. Sautee until softened. Add in some petite diced tomatoes (or fresh tomatoes if you wanna roll that way), fresh chopped parsley, fresh chopped cilantro, little more salt, pepper, ground coriander, ground oregano, a few sprinkles of some chicken bouillon powder, some ground cumin, and a few splashes of chicken stock or broth. 

Add in your chicken and mix well, adding more chicken broth to get all the flavors incorporated as you see fit. You don't want the chicken sitting in a lot of liquid - just enough to keep it moist and spread out the flavors. 

Assembly:

Get yourself some corn tortillas and a couple of baking pans or cookie sheets, or whatever makes you happiest. 

Now corn tortillas are a bitch to roll if you ask me. Maybe its because we keep them in the fridge, I don't know. So what we do, is we take a couple of paper towels, place one on the bottom of your microwave, place about 3 corn tortillas on top nicely spread out, and place another wet/damp paper towel on top of the tortillas. Shut the microwave and heat the tortillas up for a little longer than 1 minute. It'll make the tortillas nice and soft and pliable for filling and rolling. Your welcome. 

Anyway! Spray your pans/sheets/whatever with some cooking spray and pull out a warmed tortilla. Add a nice spoonful of your chicken mixture into the tortilla, sprinkle with some shredded cheddar cheese, and roll it up. Place it on your cookie sheet, seam-side down and keep going until you run out of chicken filling. 

Bake them in the oven for however long you need to until the tortillas have browned a little bit and are noticeably tougher/crunchy on the outside. (The picture above shows you what they looked like out of the oven.)

Sauce:

Now my mother and I like to top our tacos with shredded cabbage, some salsa or hot sauce or your own homemade tomato-based sauce (my mom makes a ketchup-based, sweet salsa that I adore), and grated Parmesan cheese. Exhibit B:

Trust me, you want these in your mouth.

You can go ahead and do whatever it is you want with your tacos, but I promise you if you don't mind fresh shredded cabbage, this is an excellent way to serve them. 

And there you have it! Delicious, relatively healthy chicken tacos. You won't be disappointed. 

A Little Self-Control Goes a Long Way

I won't say that I'm completely back on track because I tend to sabotage myself the second I try to convince myself that I am. But I've been doing pretty good food-wise this week. Today I did alright, and most of the week I've been using fresh ingredients and making big batches of deliciously healthy foods.

This was my dinner tonight:

Lemon-thyme roasted chicken and honey thyme roasted carrots that I linked to in my meal planning post, and herbed couscous because I felt that I needed something more than just the meat and veggies. Everything was delicious, healthy, and super filling.

I ended up with 4 very large chicken breasts, which is way more meat than I thought I would end up having. All that means is that I get to rearrange some of my meal planning for the week and push a few recipes back a day or two. Tomorrow I'll eat this again for dinner, and then on Saturday I'll have some for lunch and then make chicken tacos for dinner. If I remember, I'll post some pictures of the tacos or whatever it is that I make with the remaining chicken.

I haven't made it to the gym yet... one thing at a time, right?

Strawberry Banana Dessert for a Sweet Tooth

So tonight I made the pork tenderloin and the ginger carrots that I linked to in my previous post. I'm telling you all right now, you need to try out those recipes. The pork was moist, tender, filled with flavor and super delicious. The ginger carrots paired really well with the pork and the soy sauce marinade, and I threw in maybe half a cup of rice pilaf from last night's dinner.

Of course, dinner was over, and as usual my sweet tooth started to rear its ugly head. I started picturing chocolate, caramel, marshmallow fluff, peanut butter chips, cookie dough.... My brain is a disaster when I crave sugar and sweets. So I went online and started to browse some dessert ideas, but most of them require more effort and energy and dirty dishes than I'm willing to deal with at 9:30 at night.

Then I found a fantastically simple dessert idea floating around, and if I knew who posted it originally, I would provide some credit. It was bananas, honey, and cinnamon. I thought that sounded pretty perfect but I really wanted an extra layer of flavor, so I added some strawberries that I bought yesterday. Easy, light, sweet, and delicious!

Quick and Easy Strawberry Banana Dessert

Ingredients:

1 ripe banana, sliced
4-5 strawberries, sliced
A few drizzles of honey
A few sprinkles of cinnamon

Directions:

Place fruit in a bowl or dish. Drizzle with honey. Sprinkle on some cinnamon. Eat.

Seriously. It doesn't get much easier than that.

Try it out and let me know how you like it. I think it's definitely my new favorite dessert/snack.

The Trials of Menu Planning

So I've never been one to plan my weekly meals in advance. I go to the store, I buy random things, I put them in my fridge and pantry. When dinner time rolls around, I look at what I have, I sit and think for an hour or two or look up a recipe, and then I make dinner on the fly.

This system has worked for me mostly, but lately I've been getting annoyed with trying to figure out what to make without proper planning. I've started to look online at Pinterest and a few other blogs and websites that talk about meal planning and having set meals for specific days. I don't know that I have it in me to plan a month's worth of meals just yet, and I have a hard time knowing what I want to eat today, let alone tomorrow or a week from now - so this is a game of trial and error.

Today I planned meals for the next week, with 2 "flex meals" that I'll swap out in case I decide to not eat one of the planned meals. I went to the store and I bought all the things needed to make said meals, without too much extra stuff. If it weren't for the fact that I was running low on a lot of my spices, cooking wines, and other miscellaneous items that caused me to go over-budget, I do believe I saved quite a bit of money tonight with this approach.

We didn't get back home till about 8pm, so it was too late to cook tonight. We bought some fresh honey BBQ wings at the store and a package of some frozen macaroni and cheese and we're going to eat like fat kids tonight.

Here's what I've got planned for the week:

Tuesday:
Pork Tenderloin with Pan Sauce
with
Seared Ginger Carrots

Wednesday:
Leftovers

Thursday:
Lemon Thyme Roasted Chicken Breasts
with
Honey Thyme Roasted Carrots

Friday:
Leftovers

Saturday:
I've given myself two options for tonight. I'm either doing a shrimp stir-fry, or blackened fish tacos. Both of which don't really have a recipe. The stir-fry I will throw together and make up as I go. The fish tacos is a mixture of like two or three different recipes I've come across. If I make them, then perhaps I'll post a recipe and some pictures. We'll see.

Sunday:
Pesto Ranch Crockpot Chicken Thighs
with
Mashed potatoes

Have you done meal planning before? How do you manage it? Does it work for you?

Let me know!

Delicious Frozen Rump Roast

I haven't posted in a while, and I'm only a little bit sorry about that. I'm working on a few projects right now, and am trying to figure out how exactly to integrate both into one venue. More on that at a later time.

Fall is here! I love Fall more than any other season and people will frequently argue with me about it. I don't care about bathing suits, or sundresses, and I get cranky when the temperature rises above 75 degrees. Give me a nice chill in the air, 70 degree weather, a hoodie, some sneakers, and a hearty meal and I'm happy.

I had a 3 pound rump/round roast in the freezer and I didn't want to wait the 8 hours to cook it in the crock pot and I didn't want to wait for it to defrost either. I decided to go ahead and try to cook it, still frozen, in the oven and see how it would do. The results were fantastic! It was moist, tender, fully cooked through (and evenly cooked I might add), and flavorful.

Frozen Rump Roast

2-3 pound roast, frozen
Brown gravy packet
Italian seasoning packet
Hidden Valley Ranch packet
Minced garlic
Potatoes, cut up into medium-sized pieces
Carrots, cut up into about 2" long sticks
Onion, sliced thin
About 1/2 to 1 cup of water.

Directions:

Remove your roast from the packaging and place it into your baking dish. I used a oval shaped ceramic dutch oven with a lid. Add your water and try to get the outside of the roast a little wet to adhere your ingredients.

In a small bowl, mix the three seasoning packets together and sprinkle it evenly over your roast. Try to massage it into the meat a little bit to get a good coating.

Wash and cut up your veggies listed above and add them around the roast into the pot. Don't forget the garlic!

Set your oven to 300 degrees, and cover up your pot. The lid on mine is a bit uneven, so I put some foil over it before adding the lid and filling in some of the gaps with the foil. You want it to stay nice and hot and moist in that pot so that the meat cooks slowly and doesn't dry out.

You can check it after an hour or two for the proper temperature for the doneness that you want. My mom is a bit picky when it comes to red meat and won't eat it if it's still pink, so I cooked mine for a lot longer to make sure it was cooked through.

When it's where you want it, pull it out and pull the roast out to let it rest on a cutting board for about 10-15 minutes. You'll notice that in the pot you've got a delicious mixture of cooked veggies and a very tasty broth that you can thicken up if you wish to make a gravy.

Slice up your meat, serve with veggies, and enjoy! We had leftover the next night and made some rice to go with the meat, veggies, and broth. Tonight, we're going to use the remaining meat to make some delicious Reuben sandwiches.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures before or after everything was cooked, but you'll have to trust me when I tell you that it looked and tasted amazing.

Don't hesitate to pull a frozen roast out and make some magic happen in the same night. It's definitely worth it!

My (Un)Healthy Obsession With Tea

So I have to say that my biggest issue with controlling my weight and maintaining weight loss has always been drinking enough water throughout the day. I love water as much as the next person, but day after day it just tastes so... plain. I know a big rule about being able to shed pounds is "don't drink your calories", but with so many other seemingly "healthy" drinks out there that taste so good, it's hard to remember to stick to my guns and drink my water. 

And then there is tea. 

Do you see that? That's only some of the tea that we have in this house.

Tea is pretty excellent. It adds a scant handful of calories at worst if you're using some fancy, naturally sweet tea blend, and it makes your water interesting again. It works for me anyway. In the summer I drink mostly iced teas, but in the winter I will easily drink more than a normal person's fair share of hot brewed tea throughout the day, if only to try and keep the chill away. There's something so comforting about tea...

When I'm being lazy, I like to head on over to my local coffee shop and get a nice 32 oz size of unsweetened iced tea with lemon. It'll get me through most of the work day and it'll keep me hydrated. When I go home I'll switch to plain water, or brew my own. 1 family size Cold Brew Lipton Tea bag for a 32 oz Nalgene bottle will serve me well for the rest of my day, and I'll get my 8 glasses in. 

Now I know some people will say that tea is a diuretic and will make you pee a whole lot and may even dehydrate you, but I'm over that. If it makes me pee, well I just think of it as my body's chance to get all the bad stuff out faster. Not very scientific of me, I know. I don't really care though - I feel hydrated and I feel less hungry throughout the day so I'm going to stick with it. If you don't want or like black tea then try some greens, whites, reds, herbals, or tisanes.

Explore the vast world of tea and see if it helps you out with your water intake goals/habits.