Slow Cooker Chicken Enchilada Soup

I don’t know if you noticed, but we haven’t shared too many posts this month so far (although our Sultan Selim Kofte was amazing & you should check it out!). A two-fold problem – we attempted a few recipes that we thought would be “blog-worthy,” that just didn’t turn out well, so we definitely couldn’t share our failures 🙄😬😣😉. And also, we used a few of our saved up vacation days to visit friends and watch UVA beat Wake Forest in Winston-Salem one weekend and to see our families in Nashville for a cousin’s wedding on another weekend! So we really haven’t cooked quite as much as normal this month!

Our lack of blogging this month is a little bit of a tragedy because January is National Soup Month, and I LOVE SOUP! I don’t know what month is better suited to officially be National Soup Month – what sounds more cozy and warming for chilly nights (and days!) than a big flavorful bowl of soup. It’s actually National Slow Cooker month too (probably for similar reasons…), so we just went ahead and did the two birds, one stone thing with this recipe – ✔️ & ✔️!

I’ve had this recipe saved on Pinterest for literally years I think. It comes from Gimme Some Oven, which actually is the very first blog I think I ever started following. I’ve made many of her recipes over the years, prior to the birth of our little infant blog. Check it out for some great recipes from a veteran blogger and much better pictures than ours! We tweaked her recipe just a tiny bit, adding a little extra vegetables & spices, because the entire world (or the 467 commenters on her post at least…) seems to love the original just as is! One little side note… one day we would like to make our own, traditional enchilada sauce, for this recipe or others. We were just feeling a little too lazy today for finding and roasting our own chilies. But we can only imagine how much better this soup would be when substituting authentic homemade enchilada sauce for the canned stuff!

Slow Cooker Chicken Enchilada Soup

(Adapted from Gimme Some Oven blog)

Ingredients:

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 1 10oz can red enchilada sauce
• 2 bell peppers, chopped
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 ears corn (~2 cups)
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 14oz can black beans, rinsed & drained
• 1 4oz can chopped green chiles
• 1 10oz can fire-roasted tomatoes, with liquid
• 2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp cayenne
• 1/2 tsp chipotle powder
• Salt & pepper to taste
• Optional toppings: cheese, sour cream/crema, avocado, cilantro, jalapenos, tortilla chips, etc

Instructions:

1. Prepare all of the vegetables – chop up everything that needs chopping and slice the corn kernels off the cob. Cut the chicken into bite-sized portions.
2. Put all of the ingredients, minus the toppings, into the slow cooker.
3. Cook 3-4 hours on high or 6-8 hours on low. Taste and adjust salt/pepper if needed. Serve with optional toppings!

Serves ~8