Two Recipes for You Today!

Yes, I have two recipes...aren't you excited? The first one is a cream soup base recipe that I found yesterday thanks to Pinterest. I've had to tweak it though, because the original recipe called for 1/4 cup of bouillon cubes and most on the market contain MSG. I'm allergic to MSG. Now, when I say "allergic," I don't mean "Ugh! My tummy was upset for two days." No, no, no my friends...allergic...as in "Oh my gosh! My tongue is swelling, my throat itches, and my lips feel REALLY weird!" ALLERGIC. I'm not the only one that suffers from this issue and sometimes it can be difficult to find food that you can make without MSG. This soup base, happens to be one that we CAN work around the MSG issue...

First, gather your supplies - measuring cups, measuring spoons, powdered milk, cornstarch, spices, small spoon for stirring, & a container. This will yield a 3 cup batch, so make sure your container can hold what you're putting together.

In the container mix:

2 cups powdered milk

1 1/2 cups cornstarch

1 teaspoon dried basil

1 teaspoon dried parsley flakes

1 tablespoon dried chopped garlic

3 tablespoons dried onion, minced or chopped

1 teaspoon black pepper

Gently stir, until all ingredients look to be incorporated fairly well. They'll look like this...
This is officially your substitute for any "cream" soup that your recipes call for. The original recipe said 2/3 cup of dry mix with 1 1/4 cups of water is equal to 1 can of condensed cream soup. I think that you can use 3/4 cup of water AND 3/4 cup of chicken, beef, or turkey stock and be just fine, since we went sans bouillon cubes in this batch. To get the equivalent of a family size can, you'd use 1 1/3 of the dry mix & tonight in my crock pot, I just used the stock that was already in without measuring. Worked beautifully.

I did find out that should you want to add in the bouillon cubes, and you still want to stay as MSG-free as possible, think about Wyler's brand and Hormel's HerbOx. Both manufacturers say "No added MSG...contains naturally occurring glutamines." Personally, with the real chicken broth that I used tonight, I didn't miss them one little bit.

Now, here's your second recipe, that will cook up in a 6qt crock pot:

On HIGH, cook 5-6 medium frozen boneless, skinless chicken breasts in 5 cups of water for 3-4 hours till all of the pink is gone. Pull out the breasts and shred. While you're shredding the breasts, put your dry cream soup mix (1 1/3 cups) into the broth sitting in the crock pot and stir gently. Add the shredded chicken back into the pot.
Add in cooked bacon (I didn't have any to fry up, so I just used a small bag of fresh bacon pieces that I had in the cupboard), and 1/3 cup frozen chopped spinach. Continue to cook on HIGH for one hour. Add in elbow macaroni (approx 1lb bag), 1 brick of room temp cream cheese (DO NOT skimp on this step & go with low fat, get the rich stuff) and cook for 30-45 minutes, stirring to aid in the cheese melting and avoid sticking to the bottom. Add 1/2 cup milk and 1-2 cups of shredded cheese. Reduce heat & let mixture warm back up gradually.
Serve and enjoy! This was SO GOOD...seriously smelled AND tasted just like my favorite pizza from Papa John's. Lucky Me, there's just enough for lunch tomorrow.Thanks for stopping by and have a great rest of your day!!