Kitty's tortilla soup

This is actually modified from Kitty's original.

1 lb chicken breasts
32 or more oz (giant can plus a little one) chicken broth
16 oz diced tomatoes/green peppers/cilantro (RoTel Fiesta)
11 oz sweet corn
1 med to small yellow onion, chopped
At least half a head of garlic, minced
Juice of 1 lime

8-10 corn tortillas
Grated cheese to garnish

Tortilla strips: 

Fold 2 tortillas in half and snip into strips with kitchen scissors -- very quick.

Heat a quarter-inch or so of oil (less, and they burn instead of frying). Oil should be warm enough that they fry briskly -- stir 'em around a minute or two and pull them out fast with tongs. If it's not hot enough, the strips just sit there and soak up oil -- pull them out, turn heat up a little and return them to the pan. Drain them on a paper towel.

Soup: 

Toss the chicken breasts in the broth in a big pot, bring to boil and simmer 20 minutes or so till cooked.

Chop the garlic and onions.
When cooked, pull the chicken breasts out to cool.
Toss the garlic, onion, Ro-Tel, corn and lime juice into the broth.
Trim and shred the chicken and add to broth.

To serve, spoon out a portion, stir in some tortilla strips and shake a little cheese over it.

Notes:

Buddy's organic chicken breasts have so little fat you barely have to trim at all, which almost eliminates my least favorite part of this operation!

Yield: High -- 6-7 meals
Flavor: High
Cost: Low -- about $17 for 6 meals = $2.80 apiece
Difficulty: Pretty low. About 1 hour, especially if you get the Buddy's chicken; 15 min chopping, 15 min frying, 10 min shredding chicken.

Meals and Yields -- a plan for a month

Nine meals will get me through a work week (throw in a sandwich here
and there); 12 is for overachieving weeks.

Meals and Yields

Quick Hatch Enchiladas: 5 meals
Doofer Squares: 3 meals
Kitty's Tortilla Soup: 6 meals
Red Beans and Rice with Chicken: 5 meals
Lemon Herb Chicken/Popcorn Chicken: 7 meals
Bobbie's Pot Roast: 5 meals
CFS with green beans and mashed potatoes: 4 meals
Potstickers/Spaghetti with Meatballs: 9 meals
Lemon Stir-Fry Beef with snow peas: 3 meals

One month's worth of possible combinations: No thinking, all eating!

Week 1 (light): Bobbie's Pot Roast: 5 meals; Honey Soy Salmon and
rosemary potatoes, 4 meals
Week 2 (light): Lemon Stir-Fry Beef with snow peas: 3 meals; Kitty's
Tortilla Soup: 6 meals
Week 3 (more work, more food): Lemon Herb Chicken and Popcorn Chicken:
7 meals; Quick Hatch Enchiladas: 5 meals
Week 4 (light): Red Beans and Rice with Chicken: 5 meals; CFS with
green beans and mashed potatoes: 4 meals
Week 1: (more work, more food) Potstickers and Spaghetti with
Meatballs: 9 meals; Doofer Squares: 3 meals

Notes on Quick Enchiladas

Yield from 1.25 lb ground beef = 9 enchiladas, or 4.5 servings (could
be stretched to 5 full servings easily, though). The Taco Bell
seasoning packet, if I can say this without being evicted from my home
state, was actually pretty good, so I'd use it again.

Made the rice and the beef simultaneously and completed all cooking and
assembly in about 30 minutes. Nice!

The Uncle Ben's Mexican rice is great and makes 4.5 servings. It's not
like rice in a Tex-Mex restaurant but it has a good, different flavor
of its own.

Super-quick: Hatch Enchiladas, Red Beans & Rice, Beef Ravioli

Super quick, low-cost and high-yield:

Hatch Enchiladas Verdes

1.25 lb ground beef
1 packet taco seasoning
small package grated Mexican cheeses
1 can Hatch green chile enchilada sauce
12 flour tortillas

Brown and season the beef per packet instructions. Store beef in
plastic container, or assemble enchiladas and store them. Spoon beef
into a tortilla, sprinkle cheese, roll and press to flatten; pour sauce
on top, sprinkle with cheese and microwave 1 minute to warm filling and
melt cheese.

Testing: Uncle Ben's Mexican Rice mix -- haven't cooked it yet, but it
was the only one not cut with pasta products.

Cost: LOW -- $15 ($3 each per meal)
Yield: GOOD -- 4-5 meals
Difficulty: LOW.
Flavor: GREAT.

Possibly even easier is the trick of adding precooked seasoned/chopped
chicken to Zatarain's red beans and rice mix. A box makes a big pot of
food, maybe 4-5 servings, and the chicken plus mix can't cost more than
$9, or about $2 per meal.

Prepared ravioli and pasta sauce are a 10-minute substitute for any
week when ground beef is not on the shopping list but plain spaghetti
does not sound appealing. Cost is probably about $7 total if you don't
use the whole jar of sauce, and for 3 meals = $2.30 each.

(I include these latter two not as recipes per se, but as a reminder to
myself that they can mix easily into any week's plan. They should all
be paired with salads though.)

Notes on Short & Fruity Chicken; add Pot Roast?

Cost: $30 for 8 meals including orange-spinach salads = $3.75 each --
not bad
Yield: 8 meals.... a little more than half a week
Taste: High
Difficulty: Average. Probably spent 45 min chopping veggies/garlic and
half an hour trimming/breading chicken. Cook time is about 7 minutes
for the Popcorn Chicken and 30 for the Lemon-Herb Chicken.

Egg seemed to help bond the chicken coating and the sauce; I also
tossed in a little cornstarch which seemed to help thicken a bit.
However, do NOT go nuts and dump in enough broth to fill a huge pan.
Doesn't cook down fast enough. Be moderate.

Keep lots of butter handy -- it takes plenty to brown the pieces, and
if you do it in waves you will need to toss more butter each time.

This might be a good match with Bobbie's Pot Roast, since you are
already chopping carrots and would just add potatoes? Can brown the
roast in the pan before simmering the chicken. Yum!

------------------------
Next half-week plan: CFS with mashed potatoes and green beans

Short & Fruity Chicken Week

Lemon Herb Chicken (with an egg) plus carrots and rice
Popcorn Chicken and spinach/orange/walnut salads
Apples & bananas for snacks

Make tea. Trim chicken breasts for Popcorn Chicken and toss with bread
crumbs.
-----------
Trim and pound chicken breasts. Chop a snack pack of baby carrots and
cook a bowl of brown rice.

Fill a large glass with:

Zest and juice of 2 lemons
2 long sprigs rosemary, washed and chopped
8 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp sugar
Most of a can of chicken broth
(possibly some tarragon or thyme?)

Egg, flour and brown the chicken breasts, then dump the stirred
contents of the glass (and the chopped carrots) into the pan with them.
Bring to boil, cover and simmer 30 minutes. Pull out the chicken and
simmer the sauce to thicken. Serve over the rice.
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Peel orange and assemble salads.