Chicken Tortilla Soup and Cornbread

Since we had friends coming over, I wanted to make a side dish to go with the Chicken Tortilla soup we'd already planned to be sure no one went hungry. I thought cornbread would be a nice choice since the flavors go really well together. I looked up several recipes and at first I wanted to try to stick with a more authentic Mexican style cornbread and possibly use one that still had pieces of corn in it, but I knew I wouldn't have a lot of prep/cook time between getting home from work and people wanting to eat, so I had to opt out of most of these recipes because of time constraints. I instead went for a more southern, country style cornbread recipe from All Recipes.com that had a 5-star rating. It was called "Grandmother's Buttermilik Cornbread." The Buttermilk is what caught my attention as I figured it probably meant a moister, more succulent bread and I definitely wanted that.
Preparation went off without a hitch except that Jeff and I were sharing stovetop space between two large skillets for the first time ever, so we had to be careful to coordinate and not make a huge mess (because we'd JUST cleaned that kitchen!). The bread was basically just mixing the ingredients into the skillet at different stages, then making sure they combined, putting them in an 8x8 pan, and baking it.

I was worried about the cornbread when I first took it out of the oven because, even though I'd used the minimum bake time, the edges were darker brown than I wanted. It turns out my fears were ungrounded, though, as the cornbread turned out perfect and delicious. And yes, it was very moist, so I would definitely recommend this recipe and will probably use it as a default because it was so easy. Jeff and I have already considered using it as a jumping off point and adding cheese or jalapenos.

Recipe from All Recipes.com

-Aly


Chicken Tortilla Soup

Aly filled you in on the background for what we did this time, so I can skip straight to the meal. I made a chicken tortilla soup, and it was pretty good. Black beans, corn, chicken broth, chicken, some spices I don't recall, diced tomatoes and lime juice. You will notice an important ingredient missing, and I caught it the day of. Tortillas. So really it was more of a "Chicken Soup". While cooking, it was fairly straight forward. Cook the chicken, dump everything into the pot and boil for a bit, then simmer.

Interesting notes from this meal. I forgot tortillas. I also realized like an hour before the guests came over that I should probably cook it. So instead of the 2 hour simmer time, I went with 45 min + however long they hung out before eating. That also meant that the chicken was basically frozen. I broke out my old trick of putting the chicken in a bowl of really hot water to thaw quickly, and it mostly thawed it. Then I diced the semi-frozen chicken and cooked anyway on a skillet. While cooking the chicken I realized the black beans should be cooked (Per the recipe) and that I don't know how.  I figured "Microwave it for like 2 min" would work, and it seemed to. The recipe called for 2 cups of cubed chicken, and that's both an awkward measurement and not enough, so I went with 3 breasts. I thought it could still use more in the final product.

The whole time it cooked it smelled great, and it tasted great too so I take that as success. I think if it simmered longer it would bake the flavors into the peppers and stuff a little more. I even had leftovers to take to work for lunch.

-Jeff