I found this Slow-Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe on AllRecipes.com, and decided to give it a shot. It was ridiculously easy, ridiculously tasty, and relatively healthy. I didn't make any modifications to this recipe at all.
The "hardest" part of the recipe was the chicken shredding, because it's pretty tedious. General chicken shredding instructions found here, thanks to eHow. I used the boiling water stovetop method, no pounding involved. Something the tutorial doesn't say but I've found has been extremely helpful is to cut the chicken into small strips. The cooking time is much shorter, and it's easier to shred smaller pieces of chicken than a full sized chicken breast. Today's chicken came from Trader Joe's, and I mis-read the label and bought chicken tenderloins, so they were already pre-cut and smaller, but cutting regular chicken breast into the tenderloin size would work too.
I used La Preferida mild red enchilada sauce and diced green chiles. I'd like to try making the enchilada sauce when I make this again, but for now the La Preferida was just fine. The recipe also called for a can of whole peeled tomatoes- mashed. I decided to go for the mashing tomatoes with a fork method. :)
Chopped the onion using our Slap Chop, which was courtesy of my family's Xmas White Elephant exchange. It makes chopping onions much easier and tear free- I highly recommend getting one, especially if you like onions!
After the chicken, onions, enchilada sauce, green chiles, tomatoes, garlic, chicken broth and water- we added the cumin, salt, pepper, bay leaf and chili powder. Since I'm a spice snob, I used chili powder from Penzey's (while Penzey's is a specialty spice shop- they have amazing spices, and if you subscribe to their catalog they have amazing coupons. For example, the first catalog I got had a coupon for a free Cajun spice.)...I highly recommend Penzey's if you live near one, and be sure to sign up for their mailing list!
The last things to be added was the frozen corn, and fresh cilantro. I had picked up a bag of fire-roasted corn at Trader Joe's about a month ago and it was PERFECT. The recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of cilantro, but since i had bought a bunch of fresh cilantro at Piggly Wiggly, we added way more.
I took this picture prior to turning on the CrockPot. Since I didn't get a chance to go to Trader Joe's to pick up the chicken until about 2:00, I had to cook it for 3 hours on high instead of 7 hours on low.
Right before the soup was done, we made the tortilla strips. We sliced up 5 soft corn tortillas, brushed them with garlic olive oil from the Olive Cellar.
I put them in the oven for about 8-10 minutes at 450 since the recipe did not really specify, but next time I may put them in for 15 minutes at about 350 instead.
The tortilla strips were perfect. Next time, I may try using our chipotle oil from the Olive Cellar, or chili olive oil from The Oilerie. They also might be a fun snack to make with leftover corn tortillas.
All in all, this recipe did not require that much assembly and it turned out delicious!
Caloric count: 262 calories per serving (recipe does not specify serving size), or approx. 2000 calories for the entire pot of soup. Our pot yielded five large bowls- approx 400 calories, or 8 WW points per bowl. Since it was heavy on the protein, it was also very filling so we didn't have any side dishes with it at all.
I cannot say enough good things about this recipe and I encourage you to try it out yourself. It was super easy to make, super tasty and the most difficult part was shredding the chicken. It would be a perfect weekend dinner because you can assemble it in the morning and then put the crock pot on low and let it cook all day. Depending on time, you could also make it in the morning before work, but since shredding chicken is a huge chore for me, I don't think I'd ever make it during the week if I had to work during the day. :)
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