So, I have this recipe from Cooking Light which I absolutely love. It's delicious and only takes 30 minutes start to finish. However, each serving is 300-350 cals (depending on which brands you use for the ingredients), and I can never eat just one serving (with careful attention, I can limit myself to 1.5 servings, but I'm always hungry later). The original recipe also calls for serving it with sour cream but I never do that (hate the stuff).

I'm looking for ways to lighten this up. Places to add veggies, ingredients that can be substituted, etc. You guys all have experience with lightening up recipes, help me out! It's an extra challenge because it already calls for "light" ingredients. Here's the original recipe:

Chicken Tamale Casserole (from Cooking Light)

makes 8 servings

1 cup (4 ounces) preshredded 4-cheese Mexican blend cheese, divided
1/3 cup fat-free milk
1/4 cup egg substitute
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper
1 (14 3/4-ounce) can cream-style corn
1 (8.5-ounce) box corn muffin mix (such as Jiffy)
1 (4-ounce) can chopped green chiles, drained
1 (10-ounce) can red enchilada sauce (such as Old El Paso)
2 cups shredded cooked chicken breast

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 400°.

2. Combine 1/4 cup cheese and next 7 ingredients (through chiles) in a large bowl, stirring just until moist. Pour mixture into a 13 x 9–inch baking dish coated with cooking spray.

3. Bake at 400° for 15 minutes or until set. Pierce entire surface liberally with a fork; pour enchilada sauce over top. Top with chicken; sprinkle with remaining 3/4 cup cheese. Bake at 400° for 15 minutes or until cheese melts. Remove from oven; let stand 5 minutes. Cut into 8 pieces.

Maybe a lower fat cheese?

I bet you could bulk this out with sauteed bell pepper, zucchini, and red onion - those are my three "go to" veggies for Mexican-style dishes. I'd use that to bulk out the serving, then serve with a side salad.

You could also replace some of the chicken with cooked black beans. Might be tasty (and would have more fiber for filling-factor)

You can use the 2% Mexican cheese blend rather than the standard, but I bet you already do that. I agree Amanda's veggie suggestion - bulk it up with more veggies so a serving is more filling. I would also cut the cheese in half. DH doesn't like beans, so I wouldn't make that switch for him, but I bet it would be good.

Trader Joe's has an enchilada sauce that is a little lower sodium than the Old El Paso version, calories are the same I think. 30-35 per serving, I believe.

Hmmm, all the egg substitute I've seen is just egg whites with coloring, so no much change there. Do you put the corn bread on the top? Maybe you could just put corn tortillas? Hard to know the calorie savings off hand though. Oh, I just read it again - the corn bread is the base, so skip my suggestion....

This actually sounds really good, and I may make it over the weekend I like the addition of the veggies and the substitution of beans for some of the chicken.

I would cut the cheese in 1/2 definitely. Everything else looks A-Ok. I am not sure what you could sub. for the cream corn--actually I don't even know what the c. count is on the stuff. I don't buy it. Possibly you could leave it out or replace?

Thanks for the ideas guys (keep 'em coming)! For adding veggies, would you mix them into the batter, or would you put them on top with the chicken? I think if I could get some kind of replacement for the Jiffy corn muffin mix that would probably cut the most calories (that and reducing the cheese/using lf cheese). Did you know that Jiffy corn muffin mix has LARD in it??? (No wonder it tastes so good...)

I do love the jiffy corn muffins ... I'm not surprised it has lard. Can you make your own cornmeal mix? Maybe make some kind of mix with masa?

I would probably put the majority of any diced veggies in the batter, maybe save some for garnish when you put on the chicken.

I saw a recipe on Good Eats last week where he made a layered Mexican casserole, like the one Megan just put up in the recipe section. He used tortillas and layered it like lasagna - for something like that I would definitely slice up zucchini, pepper & onion and layer in.

I've never used polenta, but I remember reading something about a Tamale Pie on here somewhere, could you use it instead of the jiffy? Would it give you enough volume? Or, would it even be less calorie? Hmm.

ETA - the lowfat Mexican cheese blend I use tastes no different to me, 80 calories per 1/4 cup. Don't know how that compares to the regular off the top of my head. The last I got was from Target... Alton also used small chunks of queso blanco in his dish, you might be able to top with a little of that and use less than you would use of the blended cheese? It might not work for inside the dish though, because it doesn't melt...

ETA again - found this link for making your own queso blanco, thought it was cool. Queso Blanco

What about subbing with reduced fat Bisquick mix or even a whole grain pancake mix? I know Jiffy has a lot of sugar in the cornbread mix, so using bisquick or a pancake mix would cut some of that out and maybe be less caloric?

I wouldn't do fat free cheese, but that's just me. I know some people don't notice a taste difference (I wish I was one of them). the taste is usually off and it doesn't seem to melt as well. I love the other suggestions. In casseroles, I cut the amount of meat in half and subsitute TVP. Fat free and no one can tell the difference when I serve it to them!

While this might help calorically, I think it would change the whole dish. The cornbread is integral IMHO

Now that I've had lunch and time to mull this over, I might cook more veggies (peppers, onions, zucchini), mix with the chicken and added beans, the put them in the bottom of the dish with the enchilada sauce, then add the cornbread mix on top. I'm betting that if you made your own cornbread it would be less calories. There's a recipe on the package (I get Alba). I know my recipe uses only 1/4 cup sugar for a big pan, like 2x size of Jiffy. But you know, the original calorie count isn't awful, and the added veggies won't add much and might keep you to one serving.

That does sound really good...I like Amanda's suggestion. I would deffinately load it with veggies. Onions, mild chili peppers, red bell, cilantro and maybe even a chopped tomato, oh and the lovely zuck...such a versatile little bugger. It would create another step and another dirty dish but I would maybe saute the veggies in a cooking sprayed skillet until tender and mix with the chicken.

You could also add some spinach. wilt it down first of course.

Check out Southaven Farms they have a cornbread type mix. I buy a lot of muffin mix from them and you add your own sugar and such so that may be a lower calorie option for your base. I haven't tried the cornbread one, I use the cinnamon, ginger, oat and wheat bran flavors to make muffins to snack on but I usually get approximately 16 -18 muffins per box so you'd probably only need 1/2 the mix for your recipe.

you could also try making your own homemade enchilada sauce. That would cut some of the sodium I would think.

My guess is that a lot of the calories are coming from the corn muffin mix, so if you could find a substitute for that, that would help lighten the recipe. Also, the sugar in the corn mix (third highest ingredient) could be why you find yourself hungry later. I worry about main dishes like this that have a lot of refined sugar in them, because they do tend to cause problems with my blood sugar and I'm hungry again before I know it.

My first thought on a substitute for the corn muffin mix is polenta. You could use dried polenta and just increase the moisture in the recipe (maybe add some chicken broth) until you have the amount of moisture the polenta calls for. But you would need to bake it for longer--probaby 45 minutes to an hour.

Or maybe try using pre-cooked polenta in a tube. Just cut it up into pieces and mix it in with the other ingredients. Or slice it and use it as a crust. Mix all the other ingredients together then either pour them over the polenta (or pour them in the pan and layer the polenta on top). You might need to increase the amount of egg substitute or decrease the amount of milk. The muffin mix has 900 calories and one tube of polenta is around 400 calories, so this would cut out 60 calories per serving. I have no idea if the consistency would come out right, though. You might want to just try it with half the recipe, so you don't have to feel so bad about tossing it. It might end up a disaster.

Another thought would be to just find a lower calorie corn muffin mix. The Jiffy corn muffin mix is 150 calories per serving. Maybe you could find a recipe for cornbread that is closer to 100 calories per serving (perhaps even from cooking light). It might be as easy as just mixing the dry ingredients together, so it wouldn't necessarily be a lot harder than the prepared mix.

An easy substitution that would probably work pretty well would be to sub salsa for the enchilada sauce. If you could find a fresh salsa that is only 5 calories per serving, that might help with the calories.

I would sub light or fat free feta for the cheese, (40 calories per oz vs. 80 calories), but I'm not sure anyone would like this but me (and my SO, who is remarkably tolerant of all my crazy cheese subsitutions). I also might just try it without the cheese altogether. You might find it doesn't matter that much.

You could sub frozen corn for the creamed corn (I do this all the time in recipes that call for creamed corn because I don't want to deal with the leftover creamed corn). You can also find creamed corn that is basically just pureed corn, no sugar or anything else. You could cut the corn in half and replace it with lower calorie vegetables.

Or rather than trying to reduce the overall calories--go the other other direction. Add more calories, so that the individual portion sizes are bigger and you are satisfied with a smaller portion. This is frequently the approach I take with Cooking Light recipes.

Another thought would be to add Textured Vegetable Protein. The extra protein might help you be satisfied with a smaller serving and would keep you full longer. You could just mix it with the main ingredients and you wouldn't be able to taste it or even see it. No one would know it is there.

And I always add a ton of veggies to recipes like this. It increases the volume and allows me to be satisfied with a smaller portion. In addition to Mandalinn's go-to veggies, celery is another veggie I add to Mexican dishes. You can add two cups--count 'em, that's two cups--of celery and it only addes 30 calories total. That's an added 4 calories per serving but each serving is now 1/4 cup larger. And it's celery. It's total harmless; you probably won't even be able to taste it.

The other thing I would do is have a big--seriously, ginormous--green salad with this casserole. My salad would be so big, I'd have to eat it out of a mixing bowl. Just lettuce, greens, cucumber, radish, tomato, and a single serving of low calorie dressing. I would actually eat the entire salad before eating the casserole (I have strange rules about the order I eat my foods in--I'm like a three-year old). But once I ate that huge salad, I wouldn't need my portion of the casserole to be that big.