We celebrated Stewsday this week with a recipe I created a few years ago, of which I am quite proud.  This stew is delicious, healthy, hearty, quick, and most importantly, foolproof.  Truly foolproof.  If you can open a few cans, you can make this stew.

Here’s the original recipe:

Simple Salsa Stew

16 oz salsa

1 (15oz) can Great Northern beans, drained/rinsed

1 (15oz) can carrots, drained

1 (15 oz) can green beans, drained

1 (15oz) can corn, drained

1 lb canned chicken

Water to reach desired consistency

1. Put all ingredients in a large saucepan.  2. Heat and stir.  3. Eat.

It’s really that easy.   The longer you let it simmer, the better it will taste, but if you are in a hurry you can eat it as fast as you can heat it!

This week we had a few bags of frozen vegetables and chicken breasts (not canned), so we modified the recipe, making it only slightly more labor intensive.

We used: 32 oz medium salsa (2 jars,) 1 bag each corn, carrots, and green beans, 2 cans Great Northern beans, and 1.25 lb chicken breasts (boiled, then shredded with a fork.)  We added chicken broth rather than water to make up for the juices that would have been in the can of chicken.  (Chicken juices… mmm… ;-))

We heated everything over medium-low heat for about 30 minutes;  we let this batch simmer a bit longer than usual to allow the frozen vegetables to soften.  The end result:

So good.  We like to scoop ours with tortilla chips–it is, after all, a souped up version of salsa (pun intended :-D).

There it is: quite possibly the easiest stew you will ever make.  And for the amount of work you put in, the taste is pretty tough to beat.

Enjoy!