Creamy Crockpot White Chicken Chili

With my girls all gone, only friends Kathy and Joe were available for our Friday get-together and we all have various food restrictions and dislikes so for this meal I chose keto friendly, no gluten white chicken chili for a rainy day.  I think we have always used the chili recipe from local restaurant chain, Calhoun’s, but I opted to try a different recipe this time and I chose the recipe for Creamy Crockpot White Chicken Chili from The Chunky Chef blog.  Since I wanted more than the recipe makes and a heartier soup, I amended the recipe to get the one below but you can click on the above link to visit Amanda’s blog for the original recipe and more pics like this one, loaded with toppings.

Southern Fried Cabbage

I’ve seen information that says the origin of Doolittle is both Irish and English and on St. Patrick’s Day, I always choose to go with Irish and we usually celebrate.

With Bev and Pat in St. Maarten and Cindy in California, I was on my own for St. Patrick’s Day and since I was still dieting and had a half head of cabbage in the fridge, I opted for a Keto friendly, pretty low-cal Irish dish – fried cabbage.  After looking at several online recipes and finding them to all be similar, I settled on Mary’s Southern Fried Cabbage recipe from her “Deep South Dish” blog (I assume the title means southern Ireland).  Since I had just a half head of cabbage, I amended Mary’s recipe to get the one below but you can click on the above link for her original.

Chicken Cacciatore

It surprised me at how many years it’s been since we last made this dish but Bev and I have both been thinking about it recently so when I saw a recent post from Chef Dennis, we decided to make it for our regular Friday get-together (note at bottom).  This recipe for Chicken Cacciatore comes from his "Ask Chef Dennis" blog and it looked delicious.  His recipe is shown below as written but you can click on the link for some great pics of his dish.

Since I had made the dish the previous day for our friends Thursday meal, I knew it made lots of sauce and since most of our diners for this meal prefer breasts, I split the sauce into two pans. I followed Chef’s recipe as written for the six large thighs but only cooked the smaller breasts pieces for half as long.

Broccoli Purée & March

It must be March as we went to bed on Friday following a beautiful, sunny, 68F day and woke up to 4 inches of snow and temp of 28F with a low Saturday night predicted to be 14F.  Just north of us in Knoxville, they got 6-7 inches of snow.

It turned these tree blooms into big cotton balls.

Chanchamitos Tabasqueños

A couple of years ago, our friend who looks after a local Hispanic community at her church asked us if we would like some homemade Chan Chany’s (short a) which she described as being similar to a tamale.  Even though I never order tamales in a Mexican restaurant, I ordered a dozen and when they came they were round verses the traditional flatter shape and they had an orange cast to them.

Pork Chops and Fried Apples

Before I get to the food let me talk about the weather a minute.  Since a home air conditioner must cool the entire house - walls, furniture, flooring, appliances - everything, I rarely turn it on until we are ready to leave it on for the season.  But this year, with temps predicted for nearly 80 on Mar 4 & 6, I decided to fire it up to cool some and be sure it was working okay.  I can't say for sure, but I doubt the A/C has ever been on this early.  More spring-like weather coming next week.

Now for the food.  I had eaten, or given away, all of my Canadian bacon so Bev picked up another half pork loin for me to make another one, but before making the bacon, I sliced off a few chops for supper.

I made up the bacon brine and added the chops for an overnight soak as well.  After removing them from the brine, I gave them a quick rinse and let them air dry in the fridge.  Since they had spent about 16 hours in the brine, I only added some pepper prior to cooking, but I did Jaccard them to tenderize.

Bev used our peeler/slicer to prep the apples – this is a great little tool.

Greek Scramble

If you’ve been reading this blog for much time, you likely know that I am a big egg fan and it has become especially so on my Keto friendly diet.  My usual breakfast for a while has been fried or scrambled eggs with a couple ounces of ham or Canadian bacon which makes for around a 300 calorie meal.  With at least another month to go to reach my pre-hip replacement weight goal, I’m ready to get more creative.

I looked at several recipes online and used one from Kitchn for a Greek scramble as my starting point for this dish and to get an idea for ingredient amounts which I cut in half to get just two servings.  The recipe as I made it has about 680 calories total.  You can click on the above link for the original recipe.