Daily Favorites: Loaded Nachos

 

In the days when I ate whatever I wanted, this was a favorite of mine. I wouldn't treat it like a meal. It was a nice snack, usually later at night. So following what I did with the tots, I'm taking an appetizer/snack and just having it as a meal. I learned from the tots, that without meat it wasn't very filling. So I'm adding chicken to try to make it more filling. 

Calorie Breakdown

2 servings of chips: 280

1 small serving of chicken: 100

2 servings of cheese: 220

1 serving of sour cream: 35

salsa, jalapeno, cilantro: 15

So that's 650 for a plate of chicken nachos. 

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Man, is this good. It's easy to see how I got fat. I could easily eat 2-3 plates of this as a meal, or have a plate 2 hours after my real dinner. Also, I gotta say, I think it's one of the most visually interesting dishes I make.

On most things, I prefer salsa verde. But on nachos with green coming from the jalapenos and cilantro, I feel like I need the red to balance the color. Queso is great, but on nachos I prefer melted cheese.

I had been craving nachos for a while now and had put them on my list of cheat meals to have. The salty chips with the melted cheese...so good. There's different kinds of satisfying. There's the I'm full kind of satisfied that you get after eating a lot of something, and then there's the cravable kind of satisfying, where you get something that is rich and indulgent. Sometimes that's a dessert, or french toast, and sometimes it's salty tortilla chips covered in melted cheddar. 

The chicken definitely helps it to be more filling, but still, the problem with this is a meal is it isn't going to be as filling as others. It's basically taking the eat 2 slices of pizza instead of 5 approach to eating healthy. Which works in theory, it's just a lot easier to eat a healthier filling meal than it is to stop after 650 calories of something indulgent. So this dish is nice to have on the roster as an occasional treat, but it's not going to be an every week meal. 

As good as the chips and cheese are though, I really love how the chicken, jalapenos, sour cream and cilantro all work together too. Which gave me an idea to make this more of a recurring meal: Nachos without Chips. Replace the tortilla chips with more chicken and it would be really filling while still capturing most of the flavors.