Creamy Chicken & Mushrooms with a White Balsamic Spinach Salad

This is my last major week of classes before finals! I have had tests, papers, and presentations, so I have been living off of leftovers for every meal. I wasn't going to have time to cook tonight, so I planned ahead for a crock pot dinner. I bought all of the ingredients on Saturday at the store, and since then I have been REALLY looking forward to this recipe. It comes from my new "Best Weight Loss Recipes" cookbook, the same one I got my recipe for Goat Cheese Manicotti from.

Three awesome things about this meal: 1. Creamy...enough said. 2. Mushrooms. I used to hate them, but now I think they're soooo good. I haven't cooked with them for a while, so I'm looking forward to it 3. Crock pot. I did all the prep for this before I went to class this morning (including my salad dressing), so tonight I can just throw everything on a plate and dinner is served.

I also threw in a recipe for a spinach salad that I love to make. If you've never tried white balsamic vinegar, I highly recommend you do. It is a lot lighter than regular balsamic, and it has a really fruity and sweet taste. I love vinegar (weird, I know), so it's a little bit vinegar intense. If you don't like it that acidic, just add some more oil, honey, etc.

Recipe Notes: I couldn't find quick cooking tapioca, but it just acts as a thickener. Corn starch was a good substitute. I also doubled the wine to get some more liquid in there. Fancy mushrooms are too expensive, so I just used plain white mushrooms. Since I taste everything before I eat it, I found that it was a little bit bland with the recipe alone. I added 1/4 tsp each of dried thyme, dried rosemary, and dried oregano leaves.

Creamy Chicken & Mushrooms

Ingredients:
1 Tbsp trans-free margarine
1/4 cup dry white wine
2 Tbsp quick cooking tapioca
2 lb boneless, skinless chicken breasts, fat trimmed and halved
1 lb mixed fresh mushrooms (shiitake, cremini, or portobello), cut into smaller pieces if necessary
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
4 oz. fat free cream cheese

1. Coat 5 quart or larger slow cooker with margarine, leaving excess inside. Add wine and tapioca to cooker  and stir to dissolve.

2. Add chicken and mushrooms. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

3. Cover. Cook on low 7 hours. Stir well to combine and cook 1 hr more.

4. Stir in cream cheese and serve.

Servings: 4
Per serving: 359 Calories, 59 g protein, 16 g carbs, 2 g fiber, 6 g fat, 2 g sat fat, 571 mg sodium

White Balsamic Spinach Salad

4 cups fresh baby spinach
2 tbsp white balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
The juice from half a lemon
1/4-1/2 tsp honey to desired sweetness
A small squirt of dijon mustard (about 1/4 tsp)
S&P to taste
Any toppings you'd like. I love this one with chopped pecans/walnuts or toasted almonds and dried cranberries.

Combine all ingredients except spinach in a container that seals. Shake well. Pour dressing over spinach and toss to coat. **I think this recipe makes too much dressing, so just use what you like and save the rest in the fridge.

Taste Rating: 7
This has nothing to do with my taste, but my dish completely does NOT look like the picture in my cookbook. The one in the book is of course beautiful, with full pieces of chicken and a light colored sauce. My chicken completely fell apart when I added the cream cheese, so this turned into a sort of creamy shredded chicken mess. But aside from that, it tasted pretty good. Not my absolute favorite dish, but I would absolutely eat it again.

Easy Rating: 9
Crock pot meals are the best. Just throw everything into the pot, and let time do the rest. All I had to do was cut the mushrooms into quarters. So easy!

Overall Rating: 8

Mushroom Crust Pizza

Hello! So this is my first blog post ever, and I'm pretty excited to let all of you into my kitchen. My food goal here is to find as many delicious recipes as possible...all of which are healthy! I love how I feel when I eat good-for-you food, but I can't stand the "rabbit food" taste of a lot of healthy recipes. It makes it hard to stay on track, so I want to find things that I will actually enjoy eating. I'll be trying out a new recipe every week, and then telling you how it goes!

A quick note about my cooking style: I don't usually measure things, especially seasonings. I just use what tastes right. So when I say "1 tsp Italian seasoning" that is totally an estimate...if you think a recipe needs more or less of anything, just go for it!

For my first recipe, I decided to make mushroom-crust pizzas. Basically, these are just giant stuffed mushrooms filled with pizza toppings.

Ingredients:
2 portobello mushroom caps
1/2 red onion, chopped
1/2 green bell pepper, chopped
2 oz. reduced fat sausage, browned (To reduce the fat even more, take a couple of paper towels, and squeeze the extra grease out after it's finished cooking. Just make sure to do this before it cools.)
10ish turkey pepperonis, cut into 4ths (To make them about the same size as the rest of the ingredients)
About half of a 15 oz. can crushed tomatoes (These might come in 8 oz. cans, I just had a 15 oz. one already)
1 tsp Italian seasoning
Pinch of salt
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper (optional)
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella
1/2 cup shredded parmesean

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350. Spray a baking sheet or dish with cooking spray.

1. Clean the mushrooms by wiping them with a damp cloth. Don't rinse them in water, because mushrooms are really absorbent and they'll soak up all of the water. Put the mushrooms cap-down in the baking dish.

2. Using about half of the mozzarella and parmesean, cover the inside of the mushroom.

3. In a bowl, combine chopped onion, bell pepper, sausage, pepperoni, crushed tomatoes, Italian seasoning, salt, crushed red pepper, and the rest of the cheese. Put this "stuffing" inside the mushrooms.

4. Bake at 350 for about 25 minutes (less if the mushrooms aren't that big), until they are heated all the way through and the liquid from the mushrooms is cooked out a bit.

I served this with a salad, and with one mushroom, it was the perfect amount of food for me.

Easiness rating: 8
The only thing that required any effort at all was chopping the veggies and browning the sausage.

Taste rating: 7
They tasted pretty good. The veggies in the stuffing needed a little more cook time, so I will probably sautee them for a couple of minutes before putting them in the stuffing next time. I would also have liked a little more cheese, but that's probably just the cheese lover in me.

Overall rating: 7.5

Overall, I really like this recipe, although I could probably change it up a bit next time. There are a thousand different ways to make this. You can use whatever pizza toppings you like. You can add extra pepperoni, nix the bell peppers, get rid of the meat for a vegetarian meal, or anything else that floats your boat. I also would like to try some different stuffings altogether, like spinach and artichoke. The flexibility of this is what I like the most!