Baked Chicken Chimichangas!
This is the epitome of our household- the perfect white girl turned mexican dish.
Here is the original link for Taste of Home:
I made a few changes to the recipe in order to reduce calories and worried about how they were going to turn out but they ended up being just fine.
Prepping the Chimichangas was very easy! Shred the chicken and chop the ingredients. I used a couple teaspoons of onion powder instead of chopped onion and I didn't use any oregano at all (not a fan of the taste!)
Fresh Baked from the oven! Perfectly browned and lightly crispy.
The sauce is where I started to get a little bit worried (one because I forgot I needed to make it) and the recipe calls for chicken bouillon granules. I was going to use chicken stock except I really didn't get much off of my chicken breast.
I was googling alternatives and happened to be steaming vegetables for a side. Apparently you can use vegetable stock instead of chicken stock, which brings down the calories by a lot, but made my sauce a little watery.
Vegetable stock
Instead of using half and half cream I used almond milk (another way to cut the calories down by a lot)
I added the 1/4 c. of flour and continued to stir it but the sauce wasn't gaining much consistency. I ended up stirring in about another 1/4 c. so that it wasn't so runny, but then I ran into the issue of the flour not completely dissolving.
Nothing a trusty whisk can't handle!
The sauce with green chilies ended up being really tasty so I'm glad I didn't just default to salsa. Overall everything took about 40 min.
I would guess that the final calorie count of each chimichanga was about 330? (100 less than the original recipe) if you use almond milk and vegetable stock.
Voila! I took the littlest piece and had my nice side of steamed green beans, carrots, and cauliflower. It was delicious and made plenty!
