Easy Buffalo Chicken

If I find a healthy recipe that tastes great and requires almost NO effort, you better believe I'm gonna share it with you! I'm all about NOT making things from scratch if I can find a healthy ready-made option.  This store-bought sauce is sooo good.

I even served it to my kids as salad dressing this week and they loved it.  I'm sure I'll find lots more great uses for it.  I'd like to try using it to stir-fry some veggies.  For now, here's one recipe that turned out well:

Easy Buffalo Chicken:

• Place a package of boneless chicken breasts or thighs in the slow cooker, cover with buffalo sauce (I used 1/4 to 1/3 of the bottle), set on low for 4-8 hours, depending on your slow cooker. (Chicken breasts tend to come out a bit drier in the slow cooker than chicken thighs)
• When done, the chicken should shred easily with two forks
• Serve over reheated frozen rice or quinoa, along with
• Reheated frozen broccoli or other vegetables of your choice
• Boom. Done.

I like this frozen brown rice from Trader Joe's, but I also sometimes use the frozen quinoa from whole foods.  You can just remove from the plastic, put in a bowl, and microwave to reheat.

Voilà! Hope you enjoy!

Ridiculously Easy Thai Chicken Salad

This meal is not perfect.  For example, I could have made the dressing from scratch, omitting all sugar.  I could have used organic chicken, pre-cooked during some meal-prepping extravaganza earlier in the week.  I could have used vegetables grown lovingly by me and my children in our very own permaculture garden.  You get the idea.

It's not perfect.  It is, however, ridiculously easy, and in my opinion, healthy.

Right now, for me, great or even good work just fine.  Perfect isn't necessary.  Here's a well-written blog post about that.

I've found, as a busy mom and business owner, my good intentions in the kitchen don't always pan out, and I've tossed one too many ingredients in the trash that I thought I'd get around to cooking, and never did.

Give me simplicity!

I want a nice, easy, healthy meal, and I know that if I don't shop for and keep easy-to-use ingredients on hand, I will cave and end up ordering take-out, or eating something not so good for me.

The only work involved here is washing and cutting up a cucumber.  That's it.  All of the other ingredients are pre-washed, pre-cooked or pre-packaged in some way.

Ridiculously Easy Thai Chicken Salad

• Salad greens (I like to use organic spring mix)
• Shredded cabbage (just buy the bagged stuff, organic if possible)
• Cucumber (washing and chopping this is the only work involved in this recipe)
• Trader Joe's grilled chicken strips (they're not organic, but they're a quick, easy source of lean protein and they taste pretty good.)
• Pre-cooked quinoa (I just bought a bag from the frozen section at Whole Foods and left in the fridge to thaw.)
• Trader Joe's Spicy Peanut Vinaigrette.  OMG, THIS STUFF IS AMAZING!!  THAT'S RIGHT, I'M SHOUTING ABOUT IT!!
• I added a few cashews, but this may be overkill since there's already peanut dressing.

That's it!

Seriously, YOU NEED THIS DRESSING:

spicy peanut dressing

thai chicken salad

That's all folks. If you give it a try, or if you come up with any interesting variations, leave a comment and let me know!