For Zac’s birthday dinner he requested some of his favorite Dutch oven dishes, Chicken Pot Pie, and Mushrooms & Asparagus (a family favorite).  Since a couple of us are following the keto way of eating (avoiding carbs), I also made this Chicken, Bacon and Veggies dish to be keto friendly.

(Side note – as I’m writing this, I’m also enjoying some of the leftovers from this dish for my lunch.  I topped it with some Creole seasoning, shredded cheese and fresh spinach leaves.  Then when I heated it up in the microwave, the spinach leaves wilted down nicely.  Then a splash or two of chipotle tabasco sauce and enjoy – it was delicious.)

I also modified the Mushrooms & Asparagus to be keto friendly so we could enjoy them too.

Dutch Oven Chicken Bacon & Veggies

Ingredients:

• 1 package of bacon cut into 2 in. pieces
• 1  1/2 to 2 medium onions, diced
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 4-6 zucchini (or half zucchini and half yellow squash)
• approximately 10-12 brussel sprouts, cut in half
• 1 bag Costco boneless skinless chicken thighs (thawed and cut in half)
• Seasoning salt (Some of my favorites are Creole, Slap Ya’ Mama, or Old Bay.  None of these have added sugars)

Spray the DO liner with a non-stick cooking spray.

Bring pot up to heat and add the bacon, onion and celery.  Cook until the bacon is most of the way done.

Add the chicken thighs.  I cut mine in half so the pieces would cook more evenly (they were still partially frozen) and be more manageably sized.

Cover and cook, stirring occasionally to ensure all the chicken is getting cooked through.  Often with chicken dishes I will cook the chicken until I am sure the chicken is completely cooked before I go onto the next step.  You don’t want to chance undercooked chicken.  And since the next ingredients (zucchini and brussel sprouts) are softer and cook quickly, I didn’t want them to overcook – which they did anyway, but that’s another topic.

I had started out cooking this dish using a 12″ deep style dutch oven.  After I added the chicken I noticed that there was no way it would all fit into this pot.  And since some of the chicken was still partially frozen, I enlisted another 12″ DO and split the amount of chicken to the two pots to speed up the cooking.

Once the chicken was done, I added in the brussel sprouts and let them cook for about 5 minutes, and then added the zucchini to cook for about 5 minutes.  Since these are softer vegetables, they can cook quite quickly.

This would have been ideal to cook the brussel sprouts and zucchini just enough so they were cooked, but not overdone – but my timing of all the dishes wasn’t the best, so the final dish was a bit overcooked, but still tasted great!  Plus it was keto friendly, so we could all enjoy.  And there was plenty to go around, so even the non-keto eaters could enjoy it.

Something else that would have been cool is to sear the flat side of the brussel sprouts in a hot skillet before adding them to the pot – mostly to give a bit of color, but that didn’t happen in this case.

Here’s a picture of another dish where I seared the brussel sprouts, and I really liked the look.