What's on the menu?

Tomorrow's Christmas Eve, obviously, and we're planning on having a nice, special home-cooked meal for dinner after Mass. I'll get to that recipe in a moment.

Tonight, however, I'm keeping the menu (and clean-up) really simple.

I went to the grocery store this morning to get the ingredients for tomorrow's Christmas Eve dinner. While I was there, I had an idea for tonight's dinner.

I figured we'd have homemade pizza tonight, since it would be easy to make, and easy to clean up. I got one of those pre-made pizza crusts (the Boboli kind), pizza sauce, a package of grated mozzarella cheese, spicy pepperoni, and sliced black olives (which Livie LOVES).

When it's time for dinner, I'll go ahead and pre-heat the oven with the pizza stone in there. Liv can help me top the pizza crust. Since she doesn't care for pepperoni, she'll do half with black olives (she and Andrew will eat that side), and the other half with pepperoni (which Andrew and I will eat).

I'll put it in the oven and take it out when it's time. It'll be tasty and clean up will be super easy. Basically, it'll be just the plates that go in the dishwasher.

Tomorrow, though, will be homemade chicken posole, which is a traditional Christmas meal in the Southwest in general, and New Mexico in particular. Oftentimes, posole is made with pork, but we're using chicken.

I'm using the following easy recipe using chicken, and it's from realsimple.com.

Chicken Posole
Serves 4
Hands-on Time: 10m
Total Time: 30m

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 onion, thinly sliced
• kosher salt and black pepper
• 1 32-ounce container low-sodium chicken broth
• 1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes, drained
• 1 dried ancho chili, thinly sliced, or 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
• 2 cups shredded rotisserie chicken meat
• 1 15-ounce can hominy, rinsed
• 1 lime, cut into wedges

Directions

1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat.

2. Add the onion and ¼ teaspoon each salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and beginning to brown, 10 to 12 minutes.

3. Add the broth, tomatoes, and chili and bring to a boil.

4. Stir in the chicken and hominy and simmer until heated through, 3 to 4 minutes.

5. Serve the posole with the lime wedges.

Tip

The posole can be refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 3 months.

Nutritional Information

Calories 271; Fat 10g; Sat Fat 2g; Cholesterol 66mg; Sodium 788mg; Protein 26g;
Carbohydrate 21g; Fiber 4g

Since this version calls for shredded rotisserie chicken, I bought two today and stripped the meat off. I realized I needed only one, but I ended up using half the meat from the second (and eating the rest for lunch). 

I wanted to save as much time tomorrow as possible, so that's why I got the meat ready today. It seems like stripping the meat off the chicken would be the most time consuming step in getting all the ingredients ready for the recipe, so might as well get that done when I've got plenty of time. Recipe prep tomorrow should be a cinch!