Healthy Loaded Nacho Skillet
It is officially Football season and the first day of Fall! Yay* for pumpkin everything and tailgating. A bigger *yay* for pumpkin spiced lattes from my good ol Nespresso and cold brewed coffee with my very own Pumpkin Spiced Coffee Syrup. Ok, ok we are getting all coffee snob up in herrr so let s move on to nachos because who doesn t love some gooey melted cheese, spicy black beans, corn chips, sweet corn off the cob, rice, veggies, and even more gooey melted cheese. And not the fake stuff folks because we don t get down with Velveeta like that! That s right.. nachos do not have to contain Velveeta because cheese is WAY TOO GOOD on it s own to add a bunch of crap that makes it look like plastic when in cools. You pickin up what I m puttin down? Thank You, Thank You, I knew you would understand! Now let s forget about that crap and get back to the good stuff because these nachos are the perfect balance of all the cheesy goodness you would expect from nachos, and a bunch of other goodies that are whole and nutritious. Sweet bell peppers, a big bed of lettuce, brown rice, black beans, oh yeah! Loaded nachos say whhhhhaaatttt? Ok, ok I m calming myself down but this is something to get excited about. One of my all time favorite snack foods, in a skillet, with nutrition on top?
Now that my rambling nacho madness is over the voice of reason is here to tell you what exactly this Loaded Nacho Skillet
is PLUS the fact that it only takes 30 short minutes to put this bad boy together. Cook the rice, add the beans, the cheese, the frozen corn, the chips, more cheese, the peppers, more cheese, and finally broil it for a few minutes until everyone is happy. Got it? Since that way A LOT of steps here is a pretty picture for you to see exactly how to achieve this nacho goodness:
Now if you really want to take these nachos totally over the top try adding a dollop of my Homemade Ranch right in the middle of a big pile of nacho goodness. These two things are basically a match made in food heaven and I would not tell you to do another step if I didn t think this ranch was basically the best thing that ever happened to these nachos. Nachos meet ranch. Ranch meet nachos. And they lived happily ever after all up in my tummy! *I used my Taco Night Freezer Corn in this recipe as well! Pork Carnita Bowl
Let s just get real here. these Pork Carnita Bowls are ridiculous. Ridiculously good that is! So ridiculously good that my husband took one bite and said This is way better than Chipotle. EXACTLY what I was thinking all day when I was eating it. Yes, I was chowing down on the meat all day because I decided it would be a good idea to make it ahead of time. That turned out to be a horrible idea! Why is it a horrible idea you ask? Because you will want to eat half of it before the rest of your family even knows it is in existence. You might even think up some evil plot to hide it from everyone and pretend it never happened just so you can have it all to yourself. I m not saying any evil plots went on inside my kitchen today, but I definitely ate a good third of the meat before anyone else even had the chance to taste it. When my toddler caught wind of what was going on he was trying to smuggle handfuls of meat into the living room without being noticed. Not gonna happen on my watch, bebe, because I know all about them smuggling tricks. I m the master smuggler with my expensive organic chocolate bars that I m so NOT sharing with any kiddos. I know all about hiding in a corner or closet and quickly enjoying every delicious bite before someone notices. At which point I pretend like I have no idea what chocolate they are speaking of. Chocolate? Where? Just incase anyone was wondering what exactly a carnita bowl is, here is my super awesome step-by-step picture thingy for your viewing pleasure. It is basically just like a bowl that you would get a chipotle, minus the random ingredients they use. Speaking of random ingredients I now present you with my Chipotle public service announcement. If you don t care please pretend like I m saying this really quickly just like the person at the end of the pill commercial who tells you your probably going to just drop dead as soon as you take it. Here goes: Chipotle is not healthy fast food. Their wraps contain partially hydrogenated oils (aka trans fats) and a bunch of
other crap. They use genetically engineered soybean oil in all of their products. Just because they have cool bags and make claims like grass fed and better doesn t mean they aren t sneaking crap into your food. The End. Now please, look at my cool picture thingy! And while your at it Pin the picture thingy so other people can see how awesome it is.
Wow, that was awesome sauce, wasn t it? Now, let s talk more about making the meat because I have a serious confession. You may have noticed, I don t really do slow cooker meals. I know, I know, the new moms need slow cooker meals! But I m over that phase right now (phew!) and slow cookers are just too boring for me. I need to be able to see the food and play with it while it is cooking because I m just ADHD like that. I can t bear the thought of putting my beautiful pork roast in a lonely, not to mention ugly (my mom got it for a wedding gift like 100 years ago and it is that baby poop green color. Anyone from that time want to explain that color to me?) slow cooker and leaving it all by it s lonesome for a few hours. I mean, come on people, pork roasts need some lovin too and my ugly slow cooker isn t doing the job. I just can t. This is my officially official apology to all the slow cooker lovers. I m sorry! *This recipe would work wonderfully in a slow cooker though, so if your not as ADHD about food as me, give it a try!
So what did I do if I didn t use a slow cooker? I simply used my stovetop on low heat for about 90 minutes. Yes, 90 minutes to all of this awesomeness. That potentially means you could throw this on the stove when you get home from work along with the rice, go do a bunch of crap that you didn t really want to do, and come back to some wonderful carnitas. If you are more of a nacho, taco, or burrito person this meat would be amazing served in any of those ways as well. Carnita Bowl Seasoned Rice Ingredients: 2 cups rice 1/4 tsp kosher salt generous sprinkle adobo seasoning 1 sweet bell pepper (red, orange, or yellow preferred)
1/4 cup fresh cilantro Directions: Put rice, seasoning, pepper, and water needed to cook rice into a pot and cook according to package directions. When rice is cooked, fluff with a fork and add chopped cilantro. Tex-Mex Potato Wedges I m just going to throw this out there. these Tex-Mex Potato Wedges are epic. So epic I ve included a ridiculous amount of food porn! They are over the top delicious and possibly one of my all time favorite food creations. These potatoes do take a little bit more time to put together then your average baked potato wedge recipe but they are soooooo worth it in the end!
Here are the steps to making these amazingly cheesy and delicious wedges:
I ve said this before and I will say it again the key to the perfect oven baked potato wedges is boiling your potatoes before you bake them. This ensures you are going to get a really nice fluffy inside with a super crispy outside. Essentially that is what the perfect wedge is to me! The other important part of this recipe is seasoning the potatoes correctly. I ve included the spices that I used, which are pretty standard tex-mex spices. My secret weapon when it comes to the perfect looking potato wedges is paprika. You want color on your potatoes and paprika is going to do that for you. Although this recipe already has chili powder in it, I still sprinkled extra paprika on the potatoes just to bump up the food porn appeal! One last thing to note about the spices measure your cumin people! Too much cumin will ruin these potatoes so I wouldn t recommend going over 1/4 tsp. As for the toppings, the sky is the limit! I topped mine with sour cream (which I consider essential), avocado, and fresh tomatoes. Of course we needed to throw in some fresh produce to combat all of the cheese!
Hand modeling jobs here s my audition! Come on you know you want these beautiful un-manicured hands for your next job!