Showing posts with label chicken. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chicken. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Low Carb Hearty Chicken Soup Recipe

The mum-in-law made this for dinner tonight and it was delish! It's pretty easy to make too, and something you can walk away from while it's simmering. It's a good dish to make if you're busy.

Low Carb Hearty Chicken Soup

10 slices of thick bacon, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2 c. water
3 c. chicken broth
4 lbs boneless skinless chicken thighs
4 cloves garlic
1 T. salt
1 tsp pepper
15oz can of diced red bell pepper (or equivalent fresh)
2 1/2 c. green beans, frozen or fresh from garden
sour cream for topping (optional)


In a large pot sautée bacon and onion until bacon is crisp and onion is tender.

Pour in water, 2 cups of the chicken broth, add chicken, garlic, salt and pepper. Cook until chicken is done. Remove chicken and cut up into 1" cubes.

Add chicken back into pot, and add the red bell peppers and another cup of chicken broth. Cook approximately 30 minutes.

Add the green beans and cook until the green beans are tender.

Serve hot, top with sour cream if desired. Makes about 10-12 servings.


Notes on making: We used canned red bell peppers because that was what we had on hand. Feel free to use fresh if you have it. We also used frozen green beans, as we have some frozen from our garden from last year. Also, you could chop the chicken up before cooking it if desired.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Grocery Run

I've made it a habit whenever we go to the store now to watch what other people are buying who are in line next to me, just out of curiosity. Today there was a lady in front of us, she had no meat or protein that I could see, except for two cartons of eggs. What she did have, was two loaves of white bread, macaroni and cheese, white spaghetti noodles, among a bunch of other carb laden merchandise. She spent about $200 (that's what the mum-in-law said), I didn't see the total. I could buy a lot of meat for that, and be much more satiated than after eating all that junk. She was overweight, but not terribly so, of course, she would probably be considered obese by the BMI standard.

Behind us was a family, mother, father, and three school age kids, a boy and two girls. They appeared to be a normal weight, although they were talking about sports the kids played, so I'm assuming they are not genetically predisposed to insulin resistance and because they're lean, they play sports and burn the carbs off before they do damage. I believe it was Taubes who said in Good Calories, Bad Calories, that athletes are not thin because they're athletes, they're athletes because they're thin. For some that works well, others, it eventually stops working, which is why many people who are thin when they are young are not when they get past 40. They too had no meat or protein that I could see, except for a box of flax seed meal. They had multiple boxes of granola bars (which in my opinion are nothing more than sugar laden junk food most of the time), pop tarts, frozen bread thingies with cheese on them, snack cups of fruit, along with some other frozen pizzas and other frozen carb junk.

What did we buy? Besides some broccoli (we're making Chicken Divan again tonight, it's delish!), we bought a bunch of marked down chicken livers and ground beef, for our dogs. We decided that we have too many dogs, eight at the moment, so that we can't afford to feed them entirely meat all the time, but we decided we could supplement their dog food. Before you freak out and wonder how or why we have so many, we live in the country and seem to have a knack for accumulating unwanted and dumped dogs. The last dog we got, dug into our fence during a storm. We put up fliers and no one claimed him. We figured he was dumped and decided to keep him since he chose us LOL. One of the dogs is actually mine, the other seven are my in-laws'. My dog was also dumped, we found him at a filling station, curled up in a little ball on the pavement. People had been feeding him hot dogs, he was malnourished, and absolutely covered in fleas. He also had a hurt back. He's completely better now, after being on Previcox for some months, we were able to take him off of it, and his back seems completely better. I don't understand how people can just throw a dog away like it's nothing. But whatever, their loss is our gain.

Anyway, we currently feed them the Costco brand, which isn't terrible, since the first ingredient is chicken, but it still doesn't have enough meat in it I think. The third ingredient is rice. I'm sorry, but the ancestors of dogs, living in the paleolithic probably didn't eat much in the way of rice. They may have eaten some grains from the intestines of the animals they ate, but probably not much. On that note, hubby and I were talking about it, and we wondered if that wasn't how people came to invent bread (and subsequently settle down to get their fix of it). It's possible I suppose, that if ancient people roasted intact, the stomach of big game animals that they may have gotten something the consistency of bread if the animal were eating grains.