Who doesn’t love nachos? Haven’t met these people yet.
My Easy Sheet Pan Chicken Nachos are the perfect go-to weeknight dinner meal, a fun weekend lunch and one of the best feed-a-crowd game day dishes! Made with a combination of budget-friendly canned vegetables, store bought rotisserie chicken, and fresh ingredients, my sheet pan nachos can easily go from a meat-lover’s meal to a vegetarian meal with just a few simple substitutions. I love this meal especially because I only use one pot to prepare the chicken and one pan to cook it on AND serve it on. Place the pan on the table, grab a spatula, and BOOM, dinner is served!💥👍🏼
Sure, there are TONS of sheet pan nachos recipes out there, which only goes to show how versatile this kind of dish is—like chicken soup or tacos. In writing up this recipe though, I wanted to focus on how budget friendly, nutrient dense and delicious canned vegetables are. They often get a bad reputation and seen as subpar when compared with fresh. On the contrary! Canning vegetables is a simple way to lock-in the flavor and nutrition of seasonal produce. Right now, we are in the middle of tomato season, which means there is an abundance of tomatoes being harvested right now, so how do you enjoy all of that flavor and nutrition of this fresh produce all year long? Can them! They’re taken from the farm to the cannery in a matter of hours (I’ve witnessed this myself!). Unless you grow your own tomatoes, you can’t get much fresher than this. So the term “fresh, canned” isn’t an oxymoron, it’s accurate!
Here are a few canned tomato facts I’ve learned from my friends over at Tomato Wellness:
🍅 All tomatoes contain the phytochemical (fancy word for natural plant chemicals that provide health benefits like cancer protection) lycopene, but the bioavailability of it in heated and cooked tomatoes is higher and can help protect everyone from heart disease, macular degeneration, and help protect men from prostate cancer.
🥫 Canned tomatoes are picked, driven to a nearby cannery, and canned within five hours of harvest compared with fresh tomatoes found in most grocery stores that take about 24 days to go from field to supermarket.
🍅 Shelf life of canned tomatoes and most other canned vegetables: 3 years. Shelf life of fresh tomatoes: not 3 years, sometimes not even 3 days.
Don’t get me wrong, fresh tomatoes are amazing, but don’t knock canned tomatoes. Diced, pureed, whole, fire roasted, stewed, tomato sauce…..you can’t go wrong! Enjoy them in my Easy Sheet Pan Chicken Nachos as well as these recipes on my blog:
*Just Good Salsa
*Mexican Bean Salad
*Tuna Pesto Pasta Salad
*Black Bean “Mud” Soup
*Slow Cooked Chicken Tacos
*Black Bean and Corn Bowl with Lime and Cotija
