Like Beth & Teal I just completed the Advocare Ten Day Cleanse. My plan going into the cleanse this time around was to be prepared. So I started looking at recipes and what I wanted to have made so I was ready to get started. We had a minor cold stint in Dallas, I think it lasted about 5 minutes (I kid, maybe more like a day) but that was long enough to get me in the mood for soup. So I headed over to my “i heart soup” board on pinterest to pick one out.
A while back I found a Mexican Chicken Lime Soup that Rachel Ray makes (here is the link to her recipe), that sounded good and pretty simple! After looking at the recipe and doing a little investigating, I was happy to discover this is actually a Clean Mexican Chicken Lime Soup.
Clean Mexican Chicken Lime Soup Ingredients
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
6 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
6 skinless, boneless chicken thighs, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
2 canned chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, finely chopped, plus 2 tablespoons adobo sauce
6 cups chicken broth
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
Juice of 2 limes
Salt and pepper
1 hass avocado, thinly sliced lengthwise into 12 pieces
To get started on this recipe you first want to chop up the onions and garlic. Pour the olive oil in a large sauce pan (if you don’t have one, I used a skillet at first but when it came time to add liquids I moved to a deep pot because I don’t have a big enough sauce pan), let the oil heat up then add the onion and garlic. Let it cook long on medium heat enough to start to become transparent, approximately 7 mins, then turn the heat up and add your chicken. I diced it so that it was more in bit size pieces. Let the chicken cook until it starts to turn golden, about 5 minutes.
Side note here on the chicken. The way Rachel Ray suggests cooking it is simple and quick, but in my opinion the chicken ends up tasting really bland. Next time I cook this I think I might at little of my homemade taco season and it will still remain Clean Mexican Chicken Lime Soup but with a little more flavor!
Next up, you add the chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. This was my first time to use chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, so I had no idea what to expect. AND, I got thrown off by the recipe list and red it as 2 CANS of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, not 2 canned peppers, oops. If you make that mistake like me, your soup will be a really unusual red color. So be sure to just use 2 peppers from one can. As I said, I’ve never cooked with these peppers before, so like an idiot I went a head and tried my red soup…I was literally a fire breather for the next 5 minutes. My mouth was on fire, so don’t say I didn’t warn you!
On my second attempt of this soup I actually got it right and the color turned out so much better. I added my two chopped peppers and two Tablespoons of the sauce and mixed it around with the chicken, onions and garlic. Then I transferred this to my stock pot and added in the 6 cups of chicken broth, lime juice and cilantro and let it simmer on lower heat for about 15 minutes.
Slice up your avocado and place at the bottom of your bowl just before serving the Clean Mexican Chicken Lime Soup. You can of course top it with crushed tortilla strips and cheese if you want, but I omitted those to keep it clean.
Here is how my Clean Mexican Chicken Lime Soup turned out on the second attempt. Doesn’t it look so much better? I actually didn’t add avocado to mine because I was spreading it out over several days and avocado is so tricky to keep fresh. I did add a little garlic salt and it seemed to help with the blandness of the chicken.
I was able to get 5 servings out of this batch and to portion it out I used mason jars, which worked perfectly. For a couple of the meals when I had this soup I mixed in brown rice and that turned out to be a good addition.
Over all I really did enjoy this Clean Mexican Chicken Lime Soup and how simple it was to fix. I’m looking forward to experimenting further with it.
Do you think this recipe could work in the crock pot? I just don’t have a pot big enough for all of it. Rather than cut the chicken beforehand, I was thinking I could just cook it then shred it when it was done…or am I trying to alter this too much?
I don’t know why you couldn’t do this in a crockpot. In fact, I think it might give the chicken more flavor! I’ve just never cooked soup in a crockpot because mine has a crack in it and for some reason fixing soup in the plastic liner weirds me out, but I think I need to give in and try it out some time. If you try this in a crockpot, I’d love to hear how it turns out!