Quick Dinner – Spinach & Feta Chicken Burgers

We are getting to that time of year when things start to get busier at our house. I’m sure we aren’t the only ones either. Outdoor chores like weeding the flower beds, mowing the grass and planting the garden come into play. With warmer weather also comes more outdoor activities – motorcycle rides, outdoor parties, weddings, graduation parties, camping, bicycle rides. That means less time spent at home, which translates to quick dinner options on the weekdays. I don’t want to be stressing about what to make for dinner, or punk out and make something that is quick, but completely unhealthy. Since I am on the path to healthier eating, I’ve been thinking up meal options that can be whipped up in 30 minutes or less, but are healthy, filling, and taste great. These burgers fit that bill. You get a burst of nutrient rich veggies from the spinach mixed into the burger, plus the addition of using more baby spinach in place of lettuce. The chicken is packed with protein but lower in fat than your traditional beef options, and frankly more flavorful than ground turkey. The feta cheese adds some dairy, and eliminates the need for additional salt since it helps flavor the meat. I used olive oil mayo that I spiced up with some wasabi sauce, giving the burger a little zing. It complimented the burger very well! Ciabatta rolls were a lovely change of pace from traditional burger buns, and could actually be skipped completely if you are looking to limit your intake of carbs, serving it over a bed of baby spinach with a little smear of the wasabi mayo. We enjoyed these with a large serving of garden salad, and it was delicious!

Spinach & Feta Chicken Burgers

makes 4  1/4lb burgers 

1lb ground chicken

4oz feta cheese crumbles

1 1/2 cups baby spinach, torn into smaller pieces

1 small shallot, minced

1 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

Combine all of your ingredients in a bowl, and form into 4 1/4lb burger patties. Pan fry – no additional oil – or grill until cooked all the way through, 10-15 minutes. Serve on toasted ciabatta bread with baby spinach and wasabi mayo. Serve with a garden salad for a light and healthy dinner! Also great for lunch!

Healthy Meal Idea – Spinach & Bacon with White Beans

I’ve been on a blog hiatus recently. Not because I’ve been overly busy or anything. More like I’ve been trying to enjoy the lovely weather when it comes about. Catching up on some spring cleaning chores like cleaning out the chicken coop and run. Trying out new recipes, and revisiting old ones. I am always on a mission for easy, healthy, simple and QUICK meal ideas. Have you ever noticed that most of the easy meals tend to be unhealthy because you are either eating a premade meal made who knows when, preckaged stuff that has so many preservatives you feel almost pickled after, or it’s laden with fat to compensate for flavor? Blech. Enter in the Spinach & Bacon with White Beans. It’s fast. It’s tasty. It’s healthy. It’s LOW FAT. Even with the butter and bacon. Ya, that’s right. But it’s REAL butter. Not margarine. Not anything that’s 1 step away from being plastic. If you are going to ingest a fat, make it a natural one. BUTTER people. BUTTER. Say it with me….BUTTER. End rant.

Anyways, back to this meal. It’s filling. Because of the beans. That’s a lot of fiber. Good for you, keep you full fiber. It was delicious. No added salt or pepper was needed. I used precooked bacon because it’s quick, and it’s lower in fat and calories, and we always have some on hand. Don’t feel like you HAVE to. Don’t feel like you have to use bacon either – you could use some chopped country ham, prosciutto, salami. Whatever. And you can mix up the greens too – collard greens, mustard greens, kale. I just had a big ass container of spinach, which I happen to love, and wanted to use it up. Boy, I’m glad I whipped this up. I think hubs wished I made a double batch. He wanted more. So, I guess I should say this would serve 2 as a lunch sized portion. Double the recipe if you’ve got a big meal eating man in your life. Next time I make it I think I’ll cook up an egg over easy and top the greens & beans with that. And a little parmesan. Wow. I want that right now.

Spinach & Bacon with White Beans

Serves 4 as a side, 2 as a meal

Ingredients

1 pound fresh organic baby spinach

6 garlic cloves, minced

8 pieces pre cooked bacon, chopped

2 cans Great Northern or Cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

1 tablespoon REAL butter

shaved parmesan

Add butter to a large skillet, letting melt. Add in your garlic and bacon, cooking until bacon is crisp and garlic is starting to get a little crispy looking – about 3 minutes. Add your beans, tossing to coat with the bacon garlic butter mix. Keep tossing until heated through, about 5 minutes. Add your spinach, in batches if necessary, stirring the mixture around to let the spinach wilt and cook through.

Serve immediately, and sprinkle with some shaved parmesan cheese for an extra hit of flavor!

Hearty meal idea – Spinach and Ricotta Quiche with Savory Chive Crust

Breakfast, brunch, lunch or dinner, you can’t go wrong with Quiche. It can be a hearty and filling meal addition. For breakfast or brunch, it’s great served with some fruit and a few slices of bacon. Add a salad and you have a lunch or dinner option.

With our chickens laying between 4-7 eggs (plus the duck laying almost every day too!), we are ending up with a huge vast amount of eggs – as of this morning, we have 52 eggs – before todays offering from the ladies. For a household of 2, even with our love of eggs, that’s a lot to eat up. What better way to use up some of that egg surplus than quiche! You COULD make this a crustless version (just skip the part about the crust and follow the balance of the directions) but it’s pretty tasty so I don’t know WHY would actually WANT to.

I whipped this up over the weekend so that I could have something tasty to heat up for breakfast during the work week. This would also do well in the freezer to save for when you have unexpected breakfast guests or need something to take to a pot luck. Just partially bake it (in an aluminum pan, you do not want to use ceramic as the frozen to hot oven will most likely break your dish)- 20 minutes in the 375 degree oven, remove and let cool to room temp. Freeze with a double layer of saran. To finish cooking, remove from the freezer and place in your preheated 375 degree oven, cooking for 30-40 minutes until center is set.

Spinach and Ricotta Quiche with Savory Chive Crust

serves 6

Seasoned with Sarcasm Original

1 Chive Pate Brisee (recipe below)

2 cups frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed of excess liquid

1/2 cup milk

1 cup ricotta cheese

4 eggs

3/4 cup freshly chopped cheddar cheese

kosher salt & pepper

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Spray your 9″ pie pan with non stick cooking spray. Roll out your Chive Pate Brisee and place in your prepared pie plate. Press down the edges and trip off any excess crust. I did a rough edge for my Quiche, but you can pretty yours up if you like. Puncture the base of the crust with a fork.

Add your spinach to your crust, distributing evenly. Sprinkle the spinach with your chopped cheddar cheese.

In a small bowl, add your eggs, milk and ricotta cheese, whisking to combine. Pour your egg mixture over the spinach & cheese. Season with kosher salt & pepper.

Place your Quiche into your preheated oven, cooking for 40-45 minutes, until center is only slightly jiggly.

Remove from oven and let sit for 10 -15 minutes to finish setting the Quiche. Serve hot. Refrigerate or freeze any leftovers.

Chive Pate Brisee

Adapted from Martha Stewart

Yield: 1 pie crust for single 9″ pie

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2 tablespoons chives – fresh or dehydrated
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 stick butter, cut into cubes
• 3 tablespoons ice water, more if needed

In the bowl of a food processor, combine flour, salt and chives, pulsing a few times to combine. Drop your cubes of butter into the flour mixture, and pulse until the dough resembles a dry coarse crumb.

Turn your food processor on and slowly add the ice water through the feed tube in a steady stream just until the mixture starts to come together. If dough appears to still be crumbly, add more ice water, 1 tablespoon at a time.

Turn dough out onto a piece of saran wrap, press together into a flat disc and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. You can also freeze the dough, double wrapping in saran.

Bake according to directions for your recipe.

 

Grilled Romaine Salad with Grilled Buttery Garlic Baguette

Too much of anything for me ends with me getting sick of said thing. With certain exceptions: bread, eggs, and salad. We have salad with every meal. On those rare occasions when I am out of salad stuff, it feels like there is this huge void because there is no salad. Dinner is a downer, no matter how wonderful when salad is missing. Ok, not REALLY a downer, but still. A critical piece of the meal is missing.

With the summer days having been so very hot and the hubs on a mission to lose weight, he had started requesting just a big salad for dinner. Well, sweet. I can lose weight too AND save oodles of time on dinner prep by tossing together a salad! Woo hoo!!!

So, one day I found myself with some beefy romaine lettuce heads. Hmmm…seeing as how this is not my most favorite type of lettuce, I decided to help make it more palatable to me, I’d get wild and grill it. Grilling salad is no new thing, but I think we tend to forget about this option when prepping our meals. We put everything else on the grill, why not our salad too? Now, the thought of eating a grilled iceberg lettuce or grilled field green salad sounds rather gross to me. But romaine is nice and sturdy. It can handle the heat. That char that some of the leafy tops get just adds a lovely depth of flavor.

Now, since this is a grilled salad, meaning it will be warm when served, I wanted any additional ingredients to also be grilled and warm. So I grilled up the green onions. I even cut a couple of tomatoes in half and grilled them too. And the bread, oh the bread. Grilled to perfection with a lovely hint of garlic. I could eat a whole baguette of this stuff by myself. As it stands, I ate 1/4 of a baguette and forced myself from going back.

This recipe can easily be double, tripled, quadrupled to serve multiple dinner guests. The recipe below is enough to serve 2 as a side salad, or 1 as a dinner salad. I have already asked hubs to keep a path cleared to the grill when it starts to snow because this has rather quickly become my new favorite salad. I use my Creamy Italian Dressing with it, but you can use whatever you like. I wouldn’t go for any soft cheeses though as they will get melted and stuck together from the warmth of the salad. Harder cheeses are key. As is simplicity, which is why there are so few ingredients. Sometimes it’s nice to have a dinner that you don’t have to think too hard about or do tons of prep work. Enjoy!

Grilled Romaine Salad with Grilled Buttery Garlic Baguette

Serves 2 as a side, 1 as a main

1 head romaine lettuce, rinsed dried and sliced in half lengthwise

6 green onions, roots and green tops trimmed

1 clove garlic, cut in half

1/2 loaf baguette bread, cut in half lengthwise

shaved parmesan cheese for sprinkling

butter

olive oil

kosher salt

Preheat your grill so the grill plates are nice and hot. While the grill is heating up, drizzle olive oil over your green onions and romaine lettuce halves. Sprinkle with kosher salt.

Take the garlic clove halves and rub them all over both pieces of the baguette, tops and bottoms. Smear a little butter on the tops of each baguette half and sprinkle with some kosher salt.

Place your lettuce and bread halves cut side down on the hot grill along with your green onions. Let cook about 5 minutes or until the lettuce starts to get nice and browned and flip both the lettuce and the bread. Check your onions, once grill marks appear and onions start to get soft, flip them. Cook for about 5 more minutes. Remove everything from the grill.

Transfer the lettuce and green onions to a cutting board, and using a sharp knife, roughly chop everything into bite size pieces. Place in a bowl, sprinkling top of salad with shaved parmesan. Add dressing and toss to coat.

Serve with the grilled baguette and enjoy!

Crock Pot Love: Saucy Cowboy Beans

This recipe is what I think I’d be eating if I was a cowgirl running cattle out in the great wild west. Something the Chuck Wagon chef could have put together with simple ingredients and cooked over an open fire all day in a cast iron pot while everyone was ropin’ and ridin’. Served up with some biscuits or corn bread. Maybe a chunk of beef! Yum. And so the cowboy bean recipe was born. It’s pretty easy. Soaked beans, blend the rest of the ingredients, cook in a crock pot. Very little hands on for something that tastes so amazing!

If you are looking to be frugal, dried beans are the way to go. A 16oz bag of dried pinto beans is just under $2! All the ingredients below? About $10. And you’ll get a couple of meals out of this. This recipe fed 4 adults – two of which went back for a hearty second portion. And there are still leftovers. The recipe itself is meat free, but I’ll cook up some ground meat or shred some chicken to make it more manly for the hubs. See below the recipe for my manly bean bowl variation. All the ingredients in this are things I buy in bulk and stock my freezer/fridge with so it still keeps the cost down.

This recipe has some kick. Not diving headfirst into a cool pool hot, but a nice even heat. If you want less kick, use only half of the chipotle peppers/adobo. This may look a little watery to you once you add in all the blended ingredients. Fear not. The long cooking time combined with the beans soaking up moisture will result in a nice smooth sauce.

Saucy Cowboy(girl) Beans

Ingredients

1 16oz bag pinto beans (soaked overnight in water) drained and picked over (for stones, rough-looking beans, what not)

1 large onion, roughly chopped

1 28oz can crushed tomatoes

1 7oz can chipotle peppers in adobo sauce

1 32oz carton beef broth

1 14.5oz can Hunt’s Garlic Fire Roasted Tomatoes

Directions

Place your soaked and drained pinto beans into your crock pot.

In a blender or a large bowl place all of the remaining ingredients (do not drain off the tomatoes). If using a blender, blend to make a smooth mixture. If you have little chunks of onion, no biggie. They’ll be mush in the crock pot. I use an immersion blender so I put my ingredients in a bowl.

Pour the blended mixture over the beans, stirring to get all the beans covered. Cook on high for 10hrs.

Yep, that’s it.

To serve: These beans are great all by themselves with a dollop of sour cream and some cornbread. To make them a meal, I turn them into bean bowls with the ingredients layered and then mixed when you plop your spoon in.

For the manly bean bowl meal, I fry up some ground beef or turkey (or bite size slices of kielbasa). Then I cook up some brown rice, or go old school with some mac n’ cheese (yes, the dayglo orange Kraft kind). Then I steam up some sweet yellow corn. Layer the ingredients in a big bowl as follows: Rice/macncheese, meat, corn, beans. Top with a nice melty cheese and a big dollop of sour cream. Serve with crusty bread or warm flour tortillas to soak up all the saucy goodness. The sweetness of the corn and coolness of the sour cream help to soften the heat of these beans.

Simple Meal Idea – Spinach and Ricotta Dumplings

I love dumplings – and these ones are fantastically simple and delicious. Spinach, ricotta, parmesan – wow. They are quick and easy to make. You can make them on a weeknight. Yes, homemade pasta for a weeknight dinner. So many people feel that from scratch cooking has to be fussy and time-consuming. It really doesn’t. This meal from start to finish was at 30 minutes or less. While the dumplings were boiling, I was pan frying some strips of thin steak that I seasoned with nothing more than roasted garlic seasoning and some A-1. Hubs LOVED this meal. Thought it was amazing. Simple ingredients + minimal time in the kitchen means I get to have extra time to relax and enjoy the hubsters company. It’s lovely.

Spinach and Ricotta Dumplings

adapted from The Daily Meal

¾ cup frozen spinach – thawed and drained

¾ cup whole-milk ricotta cheese

½ cup shaved parmesan cheese

2 large egg yolks

small pinch of nutmeg

pinch of kosher salt

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

2 cups pasta sauce of your choice

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add all of your ingredients but the flour to a medium bowl. Using a fork or your hands, stir to combine everything together. Add the flour. Stir until just combined. Using a small cookie scoop or 2 spoons, shape the dumplings into ovals and place on a plate or cookie sheet.

Heat your pasta sauce until piping hot.

Drop dumplings 1 at a time into the salted boiling water. Cook for 3-4 minutes, or until dumplings float to the top. Using a slotted spoon or skimmer, gently remove the dumplings from the water. Place a layer of sauce on a plate or in a bowl and top with dumplings. Serve as a main dish with some crusty bread and a salad or as a side with some pan seared steak or chicken and salad.

Crock Pot Love: Pot Roast

Pot Roast – this is one of those dishes that brings memories back. My gram always made a pot roast in my Bubba’s old teal aluminum pan. I say made because she gave me this pan, and when I make pot roast on a Sunday, it’s what I use. I love this pan. It’s not shiny and new. It’s scratched, dinged, stained and full of history. It’s been the star of many a meal. It’s a piece of my families history. Back to grams pot roast. She would sear it on both sides, put it in the magic teal pot, dump in an onion soup mix packet, a little water, and a bag or two of baby carrots. 3 hours in the oven, she would add in chunks of peeled potato spears and cook it for another 1-2hrs. The house smelled amazing, the meat fell apart and melted in your mouth like butter. Comfort food at it’s finest.

In my meal planning I wanted to try to use my crock pot more often (especially since I discovered the crock pot liners that save time with cleanup!!!) so I decided to do this as a weeknight meal. Prep is pretty minimal. I browned the roasts (they came in 2 pieces since I bought it in bulk) on each side and seasoned them with kosher salt and pepper. Into the crock pot they went with the 2 bags of baby carrots and 1 vidalia onion.

When I came home, the house smelled FANTASTIC! I mean, it was all the way into the basement! My poor dog was probably going nuts with hunger over that amazing smell wafting down the steps. Instead of putting the potatoes in the crock pot with the meat and carrots, I opted for my Oven Roasted Potatoes. These were a great accompaniment since the skins are so crispy and crunchy, and I am a huge fan of baked potatoes. Yum!

Crock Pot Roast

Ingredients:

5-6lb beef chuck roast

2 small bags baby carrots

1 large vidalia onion, cut into chunks

Kosher salt & Pepper

Weber Roasted Garlic Seasoning

Season both sides of the meat with kosher salt and pepper. Sear both sides in a preheated skillet to brown the meat. Place browned meat in the crockpot, sprinkling with the roasted garlic seasoning. Dump the bags of carrots in and sprinkle those as well. Put the lid on and set the crock pot to low. If you have a timer, set it for 9hrs. No times, turn the crock pot to warm or off after 9hrs.

Serve with Oven Roasted Potatoes, mashed potatoes, fries, parslied potatoes – whatever you like! Add a salad for a complete meal.

Want this to be an oven meal? Place in a lidded roasting pan and cook at 400 degrees for 4hrs.

Crock Pot Love: shredded Mexichicken, for tacos!

Get it? Mexican + Chicken = Mexichicken! I know. I’m weird. Whatever.

Anywho. Crock pots…what glorious wonderful food preparation machines. With only a little bit of prep work the night before or morning of, you can come home to a hot delicious meal and pretty much be ready to eat! Yipee! I am particularly a fan of the crock pot when I’m working later because it helps me avoid having to eat dinner with the hubs at 8pm. And to make things even EASIER – I discovered through a friends mom the fantabulousness that is slow cooker liners!!!  Hello easy crock pot cleanup! Crock pot liners you ask? YES! You just put one in the crock pot and let your foods cook in it – like a crock pot barrier against having to soak the cooked on foodstuffs overnight (or multiple nights if you don’t feel like using some elbow grease to clean it). Total clean up saver. You just toss the liner in the trash can. Ta-da!

Onto the recipe. This chicken is SO good. So very good. When I was taking it out of the pot it was totally falling apart. The long cook time combined with the acids from the tomato paste and lime juice break down the chicken and turn it to butter. This recipe doesn’t have any major heat to it, just a good taco like flavor. The onions get really soft and tender, the garlic loses it’s bite…We ate ours on soft tacos, but it would be awesome on hard shell tacos as well. Also fab as a taco salad meat, or on nachos with lots of cheese.

additionally, this freezes really well. It makes a lot, so I’d advise that you freeze half of the meat after cooking. It’s enough for 4-5 dinners. I portioned out 2 small freezer bags worth so we could have it on a night I forget to plan a meal, or we have company and want nachos!

Don’t gasp like a vampire at the amount of garlic I listed. Remember you are cooking this for a LONG time, so it will lose a lot of its potency. Hence the addition of garlic powder.

Mexichicken tacos

6 boneless chicken breasts

1 large Vidalia onion, sliced into half moons

8-10 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

3tbsp hot sauce (I used my homemade sauce – it’s pretty mild from the fresh garden peppers)

1 can tomato paste mixed with 1 cup water

Juice from 1 lime

1 – 2 tbsp salt free taco seasoning

1tsp garlic powder

Place chicken in your crock pot then add in onions, garlic, hot sauce, lime juice and the tomato paste/water mixture. Use tongs to mix up the onions and get the chicken coated in the saucy goodness. Place lid on the crock pot and cook on low for 8hrs.

DO NOT ADD the garlic powder and taco seasoning at this time. If you do, the flavor will be gone. During a long cooking time, you want to add the spices at the END of the cooking process so that they don’t lose their potency.

When the chicken is done cooking, transfer it to a large bowl and shred it using 2 forks. Add 1tbsp of the taco seasoning and all the garlic powder as well as some of the juices/broth from the crock pot to keep the chicken moist. Give it a taste and see if it needs more taco seasoning. Or more hot sauce.

Serve it up on soft tortillas with some sour cream, guac, lettuce, cheese, green onions…whatever floats your boat.

Sunday Suppers – Wedding Soup

Wedding soup is one of those things that I can remember eating all my life. It was filling and wonderful, especially after a day spent outside playing in the leaves or the snow. As an adult, it’s great to have on a cold day in front of the fire as a way to unwind after a busy weekend. My Bubba had made it all while my mom grew up, and my mom then put her own spin on the “recipe” to make it her own, and I have now done the same. Now, the reason for “recipe” is simple – there isn’t one. My Bubba didn’t write down or measure anything when she cooked. It was just common knowledge she filed away in her brain and would make from memory. Now I know my mom did this too because no recipes exist in all of her things, and she had never given my sister and I anything even remotely resembling a recipe. Essentially these recipes, such as this one, exist from observation. My mom would observe the things my Bubba would use to make something, and over my childhood I did the same. This recipe here is one I took the time to monitor what I was putting into the soup and it’s essentially a guideline. Cooking is something you should make your own, whether you follow a recipe, memory, or improvise and go from scratch. You need to stick to the basic components – meatballs, broth, spinach and carrots. The meatball recipe I listed is almost the same version I use when I make meatloaf, minus a few ingredients – just add some ketchup and coarse ground mustard and you’ve got meatloaf! Feel free to make whatever version of meatball you like, or add/remove any ingredients from my recipe to make it your own.

Again, this is a large yield soup recipe. Cut it in half or make the whole batch and freeze part of it. If you are going to freeze it, leave the pasta out of the portion you want to freeze, that way it won’t get mushy.Note that there is no call out for shredded chicken in my recipe – I omit this step because the meatballs are a mix of beef and turkey, so we’re still getting the poultry component and it just makes it quicker skipping this. Noone misses or notices anyway. Leaving the chicken out lets the meatballs be the star!

My last word of advice – don’t cheat and use store bought meatballs. Wedding soup is so simple to begin with, and there is no substitute for homemade meatballs. There just isn’t. And people will know you cheated because no home cook makes perfectly portioned and shaped meatballs.

Wedding Soup

Ingredients for meatballs:

2 1/2lbs beef/turkey meat mixture

1/2 cup shredded parmesan

1/3 cup chives

2tbsp garlic salt

1tbsp pepper

1 large egg

1/2 cup bread crumbs

1tbsp worcestershire sauce

Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Make bite size meatballs by taking about 1 teaspoon of the meat mixture and rolling it between your palms. Place completed meatballs on a cookie sheet. You should get around 200 meatballs, depending on what bite sized means to you. I got about 196. Set aside.

For the soup:

4 32oz cartons chicken broth, plus 1 additional in case too much broth is soaked up by the pasta

2 10oz bags shredded carrots

1 28oz bag chopped frozen spinach

3 cloves garlic, minced

1lb ditalini pasta (or whatever you prefer, following package directions for cooking)

Bring broth to a boil in a large soup pot. Once the broth starts to boil, add the meatballs, one at a time, SLOWLY so you do not splash yourself with molten hot broth. About halfway through adding the meatballs, give the pot a stir to avoid any of the meatballs sticking together. Once all the meatballs are added, let them boil for about 10 minutes.

Add the bags of shredded carrots and minced garlic, letting boil for about 5 minutes. Add Ditalini pasta (if freezing some soup, remove portion that you would like to freeze BEFORE adding pasta. Adjust amount of pasta you add depending on how much soup remains.) Cook pasta as directed, about 10 minutes. Shut off burner and add spinach. Stir until combined and heated through. If the pasta has soaked up too much broth, add the additional carton of broth.

Serve immediately.

Sunday Suppers: Pesto Chicken and Dumpling Soup

Over the summer, I was swimming in basil. My plants just went crazy. Now, I love basil but there was  only so much I could do with it before it would start looking wilty, brown and sad. So I made a ton of basil almond pesto and froze it. It was time to break some out. It was time to cook some in soup. It turned out to be damn delicious.

If this is the first soup recipe of mine you looked at, just a warning – it makes alot. I generally make a ginormous pot of soup every time I make soup so that we can eat it for days. Because it makes my life easier by be able to plan a few less meals. And it’s nice to know that i’m a few minutes away from a hot, filling, homemade meal. This soup is pretty minimalistic when it comes to ingredients. If you can’t find the frozen dumpling noodles that I used, just use a very wide egg noodle and cook in the hot broth according to package directions. In the mood for some biscuit dumplings? Follow the directions on a box of Jiffy/Bisquick biscuit mix and drop them into the hot broth until done. Pressed for time? Buy a rotisserie chicken and shred that instead of cooking up some chicken!

Pesto Chicken and Dumpling Soup

4 chicken breasts, cooked and shredded

1 large onion, chopped

8 cloves garlic, minced

4 32oz cartons chicken broth

1 8oz jar pesto (i used homemade, you can use storebought)

1 package frozen dumplings (mine are the noodle dumplings – 16 servings worth)

In a large soup pot, add the chopped onion and garlic and cook over medium heat until onion is almost translucent. Add the chicken broth and all of the pesto, stirring to combine. Bring to a boil and add the frozen dumplings (or your wide egg noodles or drop dumplings), cooking according to package directions. Once dumplings are cooked, add in the chicken and stir to incorporate. Serve & enjoy!

Easy peasy.