Chicken Tacos with Rice and Beans

I don't feel like anything we made tonight could qualify as a "recipe", yet I was really happy with the end result.  

When I was home for lunch today, I put two chicken breasts in the slow cooker, along with about 16 ounces of salsa.  I put it on low and went back to work (My mom told me about this method for cooking chicken, by the way).  When I got home, I shredded the chicken with two forks right in the slow cooker and then stirred it all up.  

Next, I put a tiny pat of butter in a pan, then added about a cup of frozen corn and cooked that for a bit, and added some salt.  Then I threw in some leftover black beans (about half a cup).  Then I decided it needed a little something extra so I added a good sprinkling of chili powder and cumin and cooked for another minute or two. 

I scooped the beans and corn into a bowl, then added a tiny bit more butter to the same pan.  I sprinkled a heaping teaspoon of tumeric over the melted butter and stirred it around for about 30 seconds, then added about a cup of leftover white rice and kept stirring until the color was evenly distributed and the rice was warmed through.  I loved the yellow hue of the rice and the butter and tumeric added a nice flavor.  It satisfied my urge to have a "special looking" rice side dish but also my desire to not work very hard for that result.

By the way, I was really not trying to be fancy with the plating of the meal here; it is easier to fill the tacos if you first put rice and beans on either side to hold them up!  

All in all, a good meal to bid farewell to the last of my pack of Foster Farms chicken.  It was cheap, but I can't buy that kind of chicken anymore with a clear conscious, darn it.  Luckily, since that chicken lasted us about 6 months, it shows that we really don't cook with it that much anyway.  Most things we usually would use chicken for anyway (burritos, tacos, enchiladas, salads, etc)  can easily be modified to use beans, tempeh, or tofu instead (case in point: while in college I once ordered a pasta dish for dinner at our dining hall and I was about halfway through eating it when I realized that what I thought were pieces of chicken were actually pieces of tofu, so apparently it makes no difference to me).