Shredded Chicken Tacos

As I promised yesterday, I’m sharing my recipe for Shredded Chicken Tacos. We make this once a month or two, and I freeze the leftovers so we can have it once or twice in between making it fresh. It’s super easy to thaw and re-heat for a delicious leftover meal that tastes exactly like the first time around.

Shredded Chicken Taco Meat

  1. Place 3-4 boneless chicken breasts in a crock pot. Cover with water.
  2. Add packet of taco seasoning (I always buy McCormick brand, which is labeled “no MSG”, for what it’s worth).
  3. Cook on high 3-4 hours or low for 6-8 hours, then shred chicken with forks.

Cooking/Serving Suggestions:

  • I serve the shredded chicken on soft taco shells for myself, and put it into a quesadilla for my daughter. When she was a baby, I would just serve her the shredded chicken by itself and she could eat it as a finger food. As she got a little older, I would add some shredded cheese on top.
  • Variations call for adding green peppers, onion, and/or salsa in the crock-pot, but we never do this, because we don’t like all that stuff in my tacos. Some people even substitute the salsa for the taco seasoning all together.
  • Some recommended sides are black beans (I get the low-sodium variety for my daughter), corn,  Mexican rice, and guacamole.

And a teaser for tomorrow… This afternoon, I got it in my head that I would finally tackle a project that I had been wanting to do – re-purpose a table that was not working in my office / craft room – and I did that, but that got me started on rearranging the rest of my room. Since we moved last year, my office has been a complete disaster, and it needs a lot of attention, but I’m making some headway. My husband went out with a friend tonight and I’m going to stay up late working in here and hopefully I’ll have some progress photos tomorrow and an update on this undertaking! (I’ll also share about my re-purposed table project.)

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Things are happening . . .

Rough day today, but I did have some productive parts of the day, so it wasn’t all bad. And I did learn one important lesson – sign up to volunteer for school events early instead of showing up at the last minute, so I don’t get stuck watching the 3rd graders. I have a preschooler – I’m not equipped to handle 3rd grade! LOL. I also learned that I need to keep my daughter’s ballet bag packed at all times so it’s ready to go, and she doesn’t end up getting ready for ballet class with 3 pair of pink tights, but no leotard or ballet shoes. (Did I mention it was a rough day?)

On a more positive note, I was able to wash and dry a load of laundry (my goal is to do one load of laundry each day), and I kept up with washing dishes so they didn’t pile up in the sink. I also ordered some last-minute baby gifts for my sister-in-law and for a friend, both of whom are having babies soon. Then I volunteered at the school for a few hours to help with a Teacher Appreciation luncheon.

After school, I counted up the Box Tops and Labels for Education to send in with my daughter to help her class with the school competition.  That was easy since I always put them in a little Longaberger basket on my kitchen counter (similar to this one except it has a lid). It’s one of the systems I have that has worked well to keep one tiny thing in my life organized for the past few years. And dinner was easy thanks to a thawed container of shredded chicken taco meat I pulled out of the freezer this morning. It’s one of our popular dinners around here, and one of my favorite things to freeze for leftovers.

And, in more exciting news… One of the reasons I started this blog was to help motivate me to work on my photography skills with the goal to work up to possibly doing some professional photography. Well, I found a deal online for a local photography workshop and I signed up today! In June, I’ll be doing a 3-hour children’s photography workshop with a local professional photographer. I’m super excited – I just wish it were sooner! Also today, my husband offered my services to a friend/coworker who is getting married next weekend. It’s a second marriage for both the bride and groom so they weren’t going to spend the money on a wedding photographer, and were just going to have family take pictures for them, but when Paul suggested I could go to the wedding and take pictures for them, they were over the moon and agreed to pay me to take their wedding pictures! I have no interest in becoming a wedding photographer, but I’m glad to help this couple out because I know them both and would like to help them get better wedding pictures than whatever the bride’s mother would be able to snap on whatever camera she has. Wish me luck!

Tomorrow I’ll share my recipe for shredded chicken tacos. For now, I’ve got to get to sleep. Thanks for reading my blog!

Happy Spring!!!

It may be 50-something degrees outside and windy, but my daughter keeps reminding me that today is the first day of Spring! She’s been looking forward to today all winter, and was hoping to wear some summer clothes today, but we compromised and she wore a short-sleeved shirt under her chapel jumper (she goes to a private Christian school). Hopefully the warmer weather will be here before too long. We had a beautiful weekend this past weekend, but that was just a teaser it seems.

For weeks, Andrea has been cranking out pictures of flowers in anticipation of Spring, and when they asked us to bring in a picture for today’s Teacher Appreciation Week gift, there was no question what she would be drawing – flowers!

These were the pictures she made for her classroom aid and the director of her preschool. For her main teacher, she wanted to draw a picture of her and her teacher… in a meadow with flowers, of course. (Her teacher often wears her hair in a bun, in case you were wondering what that was on the top of her head.)  Also, do you notice the hearts in every picture? She’s definitely all girl.

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Teacher Appreciation Cookies

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week at my daughter’s school. Monday, everyone brought flowers for the teachers to put together into a flower arrangement, so we picked out some flowers over the weekend for Andrea to bring in. Today, students were asked to bring in a snack or sweet treat for their teachers. I talked to Andrea and she wanted to make chocolate chip cookies for her teachers. I suggested we put them in some Ball jars. We went to made a double batch of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe (BEST-EVER Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies). They really are the best-ever chocolate chip cookies, and definitely chewy, which I love.

I bought a cookie scoop to use for the first time ever, and I *loved* it. I will never go back to scooping cookie dough with a spoon. The scoop I bought is slightly larger than the standard size I think – it holds about 1 1/2 tablespoons. It was sold as a “small” scoop at my grocery store, but from what I can tell, the standard size for a cookie scoop is 1 tablespoon. As a result, my cookies were a little bigger than the original recipe, but perfectly round and pretty consistent in size between the cookies. I overfilled the scoop in the first couple of batches, so those cookies were a bit bigger, but I found out they were slightly too big to fit even in the wide-mouth Ball jars I bought. I was able to fix that by just barely filling the cookie scoop for the remainder of the batches, and those cookies fit just fine in the jars.

I used two different types of chocolate chips – Ghirardelli bittersweet chips and Nestle milk chocolate chips. I’ve used Nestle semi-sweet before, but I thought they were too sweet for the recipe, so I was curious how the other types would taste. I definitely preferred the taste of bittersweet chocolate chips that the recipe calls for, even though I’m not normally a fan of bittersweet chocolate, it seemed to match the cookie best. The only downside was that the Ghirardelli chips were a little wider and flatter than the Nestle chips, so the cookies with the Nestle chips turned out a little prettier with beautiful lumps from the chocolate chips.

Here are picture of a few of the cookies so you can see how beautiful they were and the difference made by the two different shaped chocolate chips. (The two lumpier ones in the front are the Nestle ones, and the two in the back are the Ghirardelli ones.)

For the jars, I traced the flat metal lid on white cardstock, and then had Andrea draw a picture for each of her teachers and write her name on each one. Then I cut them out and glued them on to the lids. (TIP: I found I needed to cut out a smaller circle of cardboard to glue between the lid and the cardstock to fill the gap from the raised edge on the lid.) I made little labels for the each jar that had the teacher’s name and said, “Thanks for making me one smart ‘cookie’!” I designed the labels in Microsoft Word, printed them on cardstock, and then cut out and hole punched the tags. Then I tied the tags on with some cute ribbon I picked up in the Target Dollar Spot a while back.

And here’s the final result! Andrea was so excited to bring them in to school this morning.

I’m linking this up to the weekly One Project at a Time link party hosted by A Bowl Full of Lemons!

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!
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