Get in the kitchen and make me some: Six Can Chicken Tortilla Soup

Six Can Chicken Tortilla Soup

Prep Time:
5 Min

Cook Time:
15 Min

Ready In:
20 Min

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients

• 1 (15 ounce) can whole kernel corn, drained
• 2 (14.5 ounce) cans chicken broth
• 1 (10 ounce) can chunk chicken
• 1 (15 ounce) can black beans
• 1 (10 ounce) can diced tomatoes with green chile peppers, drained

Directions

1. Open the cans of corn, chicken broth, chunk chicken, black beans, and diced tomatoes with green chilies. Pour everything into a large saucepan or stock pot. Simmer over medium heat until chicken is heated through. 

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I LOVE soup. I could eat soup all year round, but I realize it's much better during the cold winter months. I know the cold weather won't be around much longer (we hope, right?) so I need to get all the soups and stews out of my system before it's too late. This was another featured recipe on allrecipes.com.

It doesn't get much easier than this. Seriously. You open all the cans, drain some of them, pour them in your sauce pan and heat it up. Voila. I didn't follow the recipe exactly. As usual, I read the reviews first and incorporated some of the suggestions. I only used 1 can of chicken broth and 2 cans of cream of chicken soup (low fat, of course). I omitted the black beans because I don't like them, and as you know by now, I only cook with ingredients I like. :)

It was a little unclear to me whether or not I was supposed to drain the chunked chicken or not. Since it didn't specifically say to drain it, I didn't. I don't like when things are open to interpretation with cooking! I didn't realize until copying and pasting the recipe for this blog that I was supposed to drain the diced tomatoes which means, I didn't when I prepared the recipe. I bought the HOT diced tomatoes and chiles. I am more of a mild or medium girl, myself, but it seems the Giant Eagle where I shop didn't want me to have those options so, hot it was.

Because I knew I would be getting more of a kick with the tomates and chiles than I would really want, I didn't go heavy on adding anything else. Just a dash of red pepper, chili powder, cumin and garlic salt. By the way, I love using the word "dash." It implies that I'm getting to the point where I don't even need to measure things anymore when I cook and am comfortable just using my best judgment. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself....

I coupled the recipe with some Jiffy cornbread muffins which I left in the oven too long (note to self - although the box says 15-20 minutes, 17 minutes is too long. Just stick with 15. Damn that "oven time may vary" statement.). I put 1/8 of a cup of shredded cheddar cheese (there are no "dashes" or unmeasured amounts of cheese with my recipes - I am calorie counting and can't afford to get carried away with fattening cheese), a dallop of fat free sour cream and two crumbled tortilla chips (yes, only two - again, I'm calorie counting) on top of the soup.

Pat gave the meal 2 thumbs up! I also really enjoyed it but am only going to give it one thumbs up and here's why: I didn't like the fact that when I ate the chicken I could totally tell that it was from the can. I could almost taste the metal. I guess that is to be expected when it did come out of a metal can but still, I don't want it to taste like it is! The perks of this recipe is that it's super easy and super fast and I want it to stay that way so next time I plan to put only the canned chicken in the sauce pan and cook it over medium-high heat until it's pretty well cooked. Then I will add the rest of the ingredients and cook over medium heat for the twenty minutes. I'm hoping if the chicken is cooked more thoroughly it will magically taste as if it didn't come from a can.