Taco Salad Casserole

This sounds like it could have been taken from some outdated cookbook featuring a woman on the cover wearing a fifties-style dress and a spotless apron while holding up a casserole dish and smiling at the reader. 

Or perhaps it would come from a fabulously retro food delivery pair here in Austin like the Casserole Queens. (They've been featured on the Food Network a couple times.  How snazzy is that?  Or sizzly )

But no.  It came from my brain.  (Please, try to control your awe.)  and...IT'S HEALTHY.  (Now you can applaud.)

I've always loved the idea of 7-layer dip (despite the fact that there is rarely a chip that has the heft required for dipping into such a thing).  So, I figured, how can I make a healthier version and maybe even a full-meal version? 

Answer:

• Browned ground turkey (in place of ground beef)
• This is an instance when you can actually go for a lower fat content since it's going to be with a bunch of other items that will give it some moisture.  When using it in other applications, I typically use 93/7 (7% fat), but for this one, you can use 97/3 or 99/1.  
• Black beans
• Black beans are the best ingredient, ever.  I typically like to use Kuner's beans with lime and jalapenos in this recipe, but I actually strain out the jalapenos - just using the black beans without rinsing them includes enough heat for most people.
• Fat-free Greek yogurt instead of sour cream
• Use this instead of sour cream.  Seriously.  I promise in this application, you really won't taste any difference.  If you're unsure, don't put it as the top layer.  When it's mixed in there you definitely won't be aware of it. Fage is the best out there.  I buy a big tub of the stuff for all sorts of uses just about every week.
• Guacamole
• The fat in this one is good fat...leave it as is.  If the avocados look good to me and area  reasonable price (oddly infrequent even here in TX), I'll make my own with lime juice, garlic, and jalapenos.  However, in the other cases, I use Wholly Guacamole.  It's great in a pinch.  I'd also suggest not putting this one as the top layer as it will brown as it oxidizes.
• Brown rice
• I know that rice isn't necessarily a typical addition in the 7-layer dips that are out there.  I suppose this is what makes this a casserole (more of a full meal) rather than just a dip.  Brown rice adds some fiber to the dish (along with what the beans bring to the table).  I often use Uncle Ben's Ready Rice, but can't find the exact flavor here.
• Salsa
• Salsa is a great way to add flavor with very few calories.  There are so many good salsas out there.  Texas Texas, Kinky Friedman's Politically Correct (from which money goes to animal rescue), and Green Mountain Gringo are some of my favorites.  You could, of course, make your own too. 
• Low-fat cheese
• This is certainly a nice-to-have not a must-have.  It used to be that low-fat or fat-free cheeses weren't worth the packaging they came in, but the past few years have seen advances in the taste of low-fat cheeses, so this can be a decent addition without adding too much fat.

Some other potential additions are corn, roasted chicken, or chili.  Also, add some cumin in there.  It's potentially the best spice out there.

So there you have it.   I like to compile it in a glass Pyrex dish so the people eating it can see each layer they're about to taste.

Garlic Anyone?

In keeping with the attempt to eat healthy, I decided to try a recipe that I've been wanting to try for a while. Baked chicken with a coating of All-Bran (Garlic and Herb) Crackers. I was excited about it. This is a considerably higher fiber option than regular breadcrumbs. And lower calorie to boot (18 crackers to a serving). Plus those crackers are wicked tasty.

Off to the store I go. Well, lo and behold, no All-Bran Crackers. Now, this is the grocery store where I shop almost exclusively, so I know that I've purchased them there before. But now the shelves are filled with the store brand gourmet crackers, none of which are even near my beloved All-Brans. So what to do? Well, I go back to the original recipe. Instead of All-Bran crackers (which was my touch) I picked up some Fiber One Cereal. A co-worker of mine has done this baked chicken thing with Fiber One before, so I knew it could work. My only concern was that the cereal has a sweetness to it that I wasn't sure I wanted in the coating of the chicken. The plot thickens.

When I got home, I had 3 plump chicken breasts, which were clearly larger than the 4 ounces each that I needed. I had looked at a baked chicken recipe and they gave a cooking time for a pounded out chicken breast. Perfect. I weighed them out and they were about 8oz each. Perfect. I pounded them out and cut them in half. But before I had even gotten to the chicken, I put 1.5 cups of Fiber One Cereal, garlic powder, dried oregano, dried basil, some salt and some pepper in my Cuisinart. (If I couldn't have gotten my hands on some Garlic & Herb crackers, gosh darnit, I was adding garlic and herbs!) Pulse pulse pulse until those little branches of Fiber One are made into powder.

I whipped up three egg whites (not until frothy, but until all the aspects of the egg whites were more homogenous than right out of the shell). With one hand (always keeping one clean), I put the now six pieces of chicken breast in the egg whites, turned them about and then into the powder. It worked swimmingly. From there, on to a baking sheet. (Did I mention I pre-heated the oven to 350? Quite a household commitment in 100 degree Texan weather, I might add.)

Once all six pieces were done, I put the baking sheet into the oven (middle lower rack) and baked them for 20 minutes. A quick flip and back in for 3 minutes. They were golden brown and cooked perfectly. Success!

While the chicken was cooking, I put together a bean puree that was the suggestion of the BF. I put two drained cans of Great Northern Beans and put them in the Cuisinart. I peeled three garlic cloves and threw them in. Let me stop here. That was too much garlic. I should have listened to BF. He told me that it was going to be too much. Let me repeat. I should have listened. In addition to the way too much garlic, I added some extra virgin olive oil. I probably should have used the really good stuff for this as the taste would have been a nice addition. Pulse pulse pulse. After tasting it (and, yes, I could tell it was too much garlic at that point), it needed something. I added some red pepper flakes and cayenne (not much of either, for the record). All in all, it's definitely something to do again, just not with as much garlic. This recipe made 4 servings.

So, if you put a serving of the puree and a serving of the chicken together, it's only about 200 calories. Tomorrow night, I'm going to add a spinach salad with some balsamic drizzle. I think it will work really nicely. Maybe the salad will break through the garlic of the puree. Fingers crossed.

Foul Foul

I hate breaking down cooked chickens. I learned in my cooking class how to break down a raw chicken (not that I remember how at this point), but one of the reasons I don't roast whole chickens very often (aside from not owning a roasting pan) is that I really think picking apart the cooked chicken is a pain in the butt. A secondary reason is that I think poultry is terribly boring, but that wouldn't really be the reason not to roast.

But as I mentioned in my last post, there was a deal at the grocery store for a rotisserie chicken with a free baguette and a free family-sized caesar salad. So I went for it. I got the chicken home, and the next day I was wrist deep in the greasy skin of the chicken while my dog was apoplectic due to the aroma. I pulled off the drumsticks and made a pile of skin and a pile of meat. I cut off the breasts, which remained mainly intact. And this is where I believe diminishing returns begins. I start poking around looking for more edible flesh. I pull off what must be the thighs, I pull off some some other little pieces here and there, and eventually I decide I've done my best.

I called my mother to complain mildly about the process. She said, "don't you just love picking the meat off the bones?" Uhhh....no. "Isn't it a great sense of accomplishment?" Uhhh....no.

All in all, I got some good meat off the bones. I've already had three meals and probably have another three using it, so that's good. Definitely good yield for the money. I had a couple small chicken sandwiches (using the baguette as well), and I did another one of my "casserole" dishes. I put some Uncle Ben's 90-second Whole Grain Vegetable Harvest Rice, some of my ubiquitous canned green beans, some of the chicken, and some of our "House Dressing" in a container together. Shook it up, and voila!

By the way, I don't know if I've ever explained my family's "house dressing." I'll leave that for another post where I'll talk about some family memories I have around food. As I say in the cookbook I'm slowly but surely putting together, memory is our sixth and possibly most powerful sense when it comes to food.

But I digress. The thing that I'm most looking forward to is boiling the devil out of that carcass with the Trinity (onion, celery, and carrots) all to make some great stock. That stock will, hopefully, be turned into my kinda wannabe Italian wedding soup that's not really Italian wedding soup. It's super tasty and has bok choy, sausage, orzo, and tons of goodness....especially if there's homemade stock. Yum.

Cooking on a Budget

Every week(?) I get an email from my local fancy H-E-B grocery store otherwise known as Central Market. Normally the deals they advertise don't really strike my fancy, but this time, something caught my eye. Buy a rotisserie chicken and get a baguette and a family-sized caesar salad for free. A total value of roughly $8. Well that's probably three meals for me there, so that's a great bargain. And I might even cook the carcass down to make some stock, so that's a bonus as well.

Then I was also shopping for my annual Irish feast - corned beef, cabbage, and champ (see my last post). The tab looked like this:

• Thyme: $1 (with leftovers)
  
• 4 bulk carrots: $0.85
  
• Parsley: $1.49 (with leftovers)
  
• 4 russet potatoes: $3.99 (with a potato leftover)
  
• 3 bulk onions: $2.30 (with an onion leftover)
  
• 1 head of cabbage: $1.43
  
• 3lb hunk of corned beef: $11.71
  
• bunch of scallions: $0.69
  

All of those ingredients made enough food for three of us at lunch today and probably two more portions for lunch tomorrow.

So for a tab roughly of $32, I got 8 servings (plus the potential for some homemade stock) for a total of $4 per serving.

Hot cha!