Where salsa verde comes from

Salsa verde just means “green sauce,” and the Mexican version is built on tomatillos. They look like small green tomatoes wrapped in a papery husk, and they’ve been grown and eaten in Mexico since long before the Spanish arrived. Cooked down with green chiles, onion, garlic and cilantro, they make a sauce that’s tart, a little bright and only gently hot.

In a lot of Mexican kitchens, that sauce does a lot of jobs. It’s spooned over eggs in the morning, simmered with chicken for enchiladas verdes, poured over tortilla chips for chilaquiles, and set on the table in a bowl next to tacos. Chicken simmered in green salsa is one of the most common ways it shows up at dinner, and shredded meat soaks up that tart green sauce in every strand.

The slow cooker came along much later. Crock-Pots took off in American kitchens in the 1970s, sold on one promise: put dinner in before work and come home to it done. Put those two traditions together and you get a meal that tastes like it simmered on the stove all afternoon, without anyone standing over it.

Easy high protein crockpot meals for busy fall nights

October is when the slow cooker comes out of the cabinet in a lot of houses and pretty much stays on the counter until spring. The evenings get dark early, the schedule fills up with practice and homework, and nobody has the energy for a big cooking project at five o’clock. That’s exactly the gap a put-it-in-and-walk-away dinner fills.

My two kids are my test kitchen. They’re the same two who fight over the last scoop of cheesesteak casserole and have no idea it’s low carb, so that’s the bar every dinner here has to clear. Shredded chicken in a mild, creamy sauce is about as kid-friendly as dinner gets, and everyone can build their own bowl the way they like it.

If you want a second slow cooker dinner in the same family, my crockpot white chicken chili with cream cheese uses a lot of the same pantry staples. And when the first truly cold weekend hits, the three-meat chili with beef sausage and turkey bacon is the big pot I’d make for a crowd.

How this crockpot chicken got high protein and low carb

The traditional plate around salsa verde chicken is tortillas, rice and beans. They’re good, but they’re where most of the carbs live. Here the chicken is the main event instead of the filling. Three full pounds of chicken breast go into the pot for six servings, so each bowl has a real portion of meat, not a spoonful wrapped in a tortilla.

The sauce does the rest. A 16-ounce jar of salsa verde gives the chicken all the flavor and liquid it needs, so there’s no broth to water it down. Read the label before you buy, though. Most green salsas are just tomatillos, chiles, onion and salt, but a few brands slip sugar in, and you don’t need it. The cream cheese and Monterey Jack stirred in at the end turn the thin salsa into a sauce that coats the chicken the way a cheese sauce coats pasta, with no flour to thicken it.

Based on the ingredients, each serving lands at 58 grams of protein and 7 grams of net carbs before toppings. The exact numbers are worked out from USDA data and printed on the recipe card below.

A couple of food safety notes, because a slow cooker is easy to get wrong. Start with thawed chicken, not frozen. The USDA’s slow cooker food safety guide recommends thawing meat and poultry first so it doesn’t sit too long at an unsafe temperature while the pot heats up. Keep the lid closed while it cooks, too, since every peek lets heat out. And don’t shred until the thickest piece reads 165°F (74°C) on an instant-read thermometer, the safe minimum internal temperature for poultry.