Black and White Chicken Chili

After nearly a week of really spring-like weather (enough to make some of our neighbors take their pool cover off - they're still pool amateurs so we forgive them), we were smacked in the face by some very cold and windy weather yesterday. Ah the joys of spring. Because my world revolves around food and meal times, I already had a warm cozy dinner planned. I don't play about my food - I ended up quite hangray yesterday afternoon on my dog walk because I was starving. Luckily I had time to scarf down a granola bar before we went to the gym and it saved me from going all Incredible Hulk on Eric. He married a charmer, what can I say?!

When I was meal planning this weekend I decided to look outside of my normal recipe rotation, and came across an old chili recipe my mom gave me years ago. I honestly have no idea where she got it from, but it's been loved for sure.

I've made it strictly from the recipe before and it's delicious, but decided to tweak it just a bit because I had a little more chicken than it called for and I'm not a super huge fan of beans for a couple of reasons: 1) I think they taste like chalk and 2) I'm not a fan of musical fruits - coughEriccough. I also cut the actual quantity of chili down by not adding all of the beans, so we had just enough chili for both of us to have a bowl and have one bowl of leftovers. Since neither of us are big leftover eaters, I try to make things that don't make too much. So here you go, my spin on Black and White Chicken Chili.

What You Need: 

3 cups cooked chicken breasts, cubed 

1 can of Great Northern Beans UNdrained

1 can of black beans, drained and rinsed

16 oz chicken broth

1 cup chopped sweet onion

2 large garlic cloves, finely chopped

1/2 fresh jalapeno, diced

1 packet McCormick's White Chick Chili

salt and pepper to taste

How to Make It:

Combine all of the ingredients in a pot. It will easily fit into a 5 quart pot, and you could go a little smaller if you'd like.

Cook on medium heat for 20 minutes or until heated through.

Serve with sour cream, grated cheese, and crackers for garnish.

Yes it it that easy to make, and if you were to cook the chicken and cut everything the day before it would be even easier. I cooked my chicken before we went to workout so it maybe took another 5-10 minutes to chop/prep the rest of it. I just dumped it all into the pot as I went and then turned the heat on and let it go.

It's good all by itself, but it's even better when you add the crackers and cheese and sour cream because those three things alone make the world a happier place.

 Big ole bite comin' at-cha!

If you're interested, this is the original and as you can see it has been loved over the years. 

Enjoy!

Weekend Recap: Another Birthday in the Books

I writing to you as an official 31 year old today. There are certain ages that just sound old and I've decided 31 is one of those, but on the bright side I don't feel any older than I did last week so I guess I'm still good.

My day started out with some dancing (which always makes me happy!) at our competition dress rehearsal. It went really well and I can't believe we're less than 2 weeks away from competition! We had a double dose of birthday fun because I share a birthday with one of our competition team members, specifically the young lady who is a tapping machine. We joke that it was a match made in heaven.  Ironically we turned the opposite age from each other on Saturday. She turned 13 and I, 31.

Birthday tulips from Eric's Grandma

When I got home I was told I had to keep the dogs outside for a little while and after a few minutes was called back inside by Eric singing Happy Birthday next to the most delicious-looking cake I think I have ever seen. It looked like it had a giant fireball on top of it with all of the candles. I don't know if there were actually 31, but I know there was no more room for candles on the cake.

Lotsa fire on that cake there

After stuffing ourselves with chocolaty goodness we headed out to some friends' land to shoot skeet. We did this almost 2 years ago to the day at the same place and it was a blast. This time around was just a fun and was made even better by ending the night with a giant bonfire! It was an absolutely fantastic way to kick off another year of life!

 Birthdays with this guy are always fun!

 Had to try out my selfie stick! (that I got for $2.50)

Don't mind our red faces, but that fire was HOT! 

Just a Saturday night in the country!

After all of the commotion Saturday, we spent most of our Sunday relaxing. I only left the house twice: once for church and once for the grocery store. We ended the evening watching a classic....Aladdin. It's one of my favorites. Eric said it had probably been 20 years since he'd seen it. Thank you ABC Family for playing all of my favorite Disney movies again! It definitely makes a girl feel 31 years YOUNG!

Woohoo Friday!

Iiiiiiiiit's Friday!!! And this is me jumping for joy!

Ok, not completely true. This is actually me doing Wings (it's a tap step). I was trying to freeze frame it but clearly I was moving a little too fast for that. But I am am quite excited about the upcoming weekend because tomorrow is a VERY important day! Why you ask? Because yours truly gets to celebrate 31 years of doing my thing and lots of other things! Yep it's my birthday, and I LOVE birthdays!

To make things even better it's going to be absolutely beautiful around these parts so it's really going to feel like spring! Basically completely opposite from my birthday last year when we spent my birthday night in the Holiday Inn Express in a random town in North Alabama because the roads were too icy for us to travel on our way up to Gatlinburg.

Per usual our plans are still a bit up in the air (as far as I know....Eric may have it all planned out and is just pretending because he knows how much I love it when we don't have concrete plans). I know I'll be spending at least part of the morning at our dance team dress rehearsal which is super exciting because that means were this much closer to our first competition in 2 weeks!

That's all I've got for today. I wish I had one last bit on 30 year old wisdom to share but it's Friday and I used up the last of my wisdom at some point yesterday afternoon.

Happy Weekend!

Weekend Recap: Sweethearts Weekend

Ahh Valentine's Weekend, you've come and gone again. Valentine's has always been a bit tricky at our house because of when it falls: less than a week before my birthday and barely 3 weeks after Eric's birthday. Needless to say we don't always go all out for it. This year we actually ended up having our "Valentine's" dinner last night. Whoops. Such is life. But before you jump our cases about it, just know that we were quite busy doing lots of other fun things......

We went our separate ways on Friday and it worked out perfectly. Eric spent the afternoon/evening at the high school wrestling sectional tournament watching the kids he coaches. While I spent the evening at the dance studio doing hair/makeup test runs for competition before we sent the mommas home and kept the girls for a dance team sleepover. I forgot how giddy girls get over sleepovers. I'm pretty sure we had a 4 hour dance party and they never got tired of it. Our dance team has grown a bit this year, as we've added a "mini" group and a few other younger dancers to the mix. The party was a huge success got me even more excited about our first competition in a few weeks. We have our dress rehearsal this weekend where they get to practice their routines on stage in their costumes and I can't wait!

Little dancers playing DJ

I made treat bags for the girls and put quotes on them....of course! Inside were little treats with corresponding sayings on them.

I hate to admit it, but I ended up leaving the party early on Friday. I had to be in Montgomery early on Saturday for P.E.O. so I told the other teachers good luck and headed home around 11. I fully intended to heading to bed as soon as I got home, but Eric had rented The Martian, and I've really wanted to watch it, so I gave it a try to see if it could hold my attention that late. Spoiler alert (not really): It did, and I think we finally crawled into bed around 1:30AM. Ugh. The movie is fantastic, though! I highly recommend it.

Despite our late bedtime, I still had to be up bright and early Saturday morning for my meeting, which was fun as always. After a quick grocery store run, I made it home and back into my sweats for an afternoon on the couch. I finally pried myself up for a puppy walk after a couple of hours, and we ended the evening with dinner at some friends' house, playing revolving DJ and singing along to every song that came on.

I got up on Valentine's Day and made breakfast for us. It was a beautiful day so the pups got a couple of walks and I snuck in an afternoon run in my new running kicks my parents got me for my birthday. It had been nearly a year since I bought my last pair of running shoes and my feet/knees/legs were letting me know every time I went for a run. Let's just say I haven't felt that great on a run in a long time. We decided to forgo the romantic couples dinner in place of a new tradition that I really hope we continue. Since most of our friends had already done their big Valentine's dates on Friday or Saturday, we all got together Sunday night for Palentine's Dinner (I came up with that all on my own on Sunday....and yes I'm proud of it). It had literally been 6 weeks since we'd gotten together with our football watching crew and we'd all really been missing each other. We've all been busy with life and just haven't had time to do anything. I'm not saying it's been a while but since we were all together on New Years, one couple got married and other one got engaged....out of 4 couples! Lot's of life changes going on around these parts. =) And I'm ashamed to admit I took exactly 0 pictures of our Palentine's Dinner. Another reason we have to do it again next year. =)

Yesterday Eric was back to work but I had the day off...a big thank you to 2 of our Founding Fathers and fellow February birthday buddies George Washington and Thomas Jefferson for providing state and federal workers with President's Day. I took advantage of my day off and got some S*#T done. I tackled the clothes in our closet and now have 3 bags of clothes and a bag of shoes to donate. I also decided to be an adult and swapped out all of my mismatched hangers for slimline hangers and I have so much more space now. I'm embarrassed at how many articles of clothing I "found" that I didn't even know were missing. It's amazing how much better I feel after I purge clothes, and it always shocks me how much I am willing to get rid of....this coming from someone who hates to throw things away because of emotional attachments. I have to catch myself in a mood like I was in yesterday and toss, toss, toss!

 I know you can't tell very well from the pictures but in the before picture, my clothes took up nearly the entire top now. Now they only take up about 2/3 of it. 

I think the biggest change here is that I eliminated the pile of clothing that's sitting under the hanging clothes, in addition to the deletion of several items that haven't been worn in a few years. 

This little booger "helped" by taking a very long nap on my sweaters. 

We finished up the evening with our Valentine's Dinner....Finally! I bought some fresh tuna steaks for us on Friday and was afraid they were going to go bad if we didn't cook them last night. I pan seared them and turned my kitchen into a training ground for firefighters. No, there were no flames and no danger. I forgot how the kitchen fills with smoke when I try to pan sear sesame seed coated fish on very high heat. It was bad enough I had to open all the doors and windows in the kitchen and still couldn't stand right next to the stove. After the coughing and gagging subsided, we enjoyed a fabulous tuna steak dinner with asparagus and a mixed green salad with (homemade) Asian Sesame Dressing. We topped it off with a tiramisu for dessert.

Oh and instead of flowers this year for Valentine's Day/My Birthday I got rocks.....

He did real good. =)