Spicy Green Chile Chicken Lasagna

Full disclosure: I cook a lot of chicken. A lot of chicken. I could probably cook two solid weeks of chicken recipes without repeating any.

Tonight was a new one, something I got from 12tomatoes. We love chicken, we love Mexican food, and we love lasagna, so it seemed like a surefire hit. As much as I would like to say that I had all the ingredients for this dish, I didn't, but not for lack of looking. I just couldn't find crema anywhere, so I had to do without. I hoped it wouldn't affect the taste of the finished product too much.

And believe me, I searched for a substitute but all I could find that seemed even remotely workable was sour cream, and considering that there was already sour cream in the filling I decided against double sour cream.

After assembling all of my ingredients, I realized I had nothing to chop. Nothing. Not one single onion or pepper. It was a very odd feeling, and I didn't care for it much. I like chopping! Chopping is how I sublimate my aggressions!

I browned the chicken first, and since I didn't really know what else to do with all that free time, I had a beer. Normally I'd be chopping and grating and dicing and mincing but it was an oddly relaxing moment in my normally hectic kitchen.

Chicken browned, it had to be cubed and added to most of the other ingredients to make the lasagna filling.

With the cumin, chili powder, diced chiles, and green salsa, this lasagna should have plenty of kick. I'm pretty freaking excited. Time for layering! Once again, I'm using Simply Balanced pasta noodles, their oven-ready gluten-free lasagna noodles. I only have enough noodles for two layers, so I'm laying it on pretty thick with the chicken filling in between.

Dang.

DANG!

Covered with foil, and into the oven at 375 F.

Finished product:

Voila!

This one was a hit! Both of us loved it and it will definitely be a repeat around here. In hindsight, I will need to boil the noodles a bit before layering because the parts under the filling were tough and the parts outside the filling were mistaken for shells. ("I guess I'll eat around the shell." "It's not a shell. They're noodles.")