BBQ Pulled Chicken Avocado Boats

Name: BBQ Pulled Chicken Avocado Boats
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 40 min
Yield: 4
Ingredients: 2 avocados; 2 tsp olive oil; 2 tsp panko bread crumbs; 1 cup cooked, shredded chicken; 1/2 cup shredded cheese ((I used cheddar)); 3 tbsp BBQ sauce, (your favorite); 2 slices bacon, (cooked and crumbled)

November 21, 2014 By Alyssa 41 Comments

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Quick! Tell me what song you’re guilty pleasure jamming out to right now! I’ve been all about If I Loved You by Delta Rae aaand I may or may not have been obsessing over this little ditty, too. I think I’m responsible for 300 of those views but I’ve gotten it out of my system now. What. an. earworm.

Anyway, suffice it to say if I get hooked on a song I have to listen to it a million times in a row on repeat. HAVE to. B hates this as he’s on the opposite side of the spectrum where he listens to a song once, twice if it’s the best ever, and then shuffles that ish. Not everyone can be blessed with that kind of willpower.

Just like with music, when I get on board with a flavor, it’s all I want to eat for the foreseeable future. It’s been BBQ overload over here, guys. Partly because it was one of the few things we had in bulk in our fridge during our abstention from grocery shopping, and mainly because it’s just so good!

Unlike a bunch of guilty pleasure tunes, I can say with near certainty that I will probably never get tired of BBQ pulled chicken, sprinkled with bacon and covered in cheese, all tucked inside an avocado.

Nooooope. Put this one on repeat, baby!

So I’m a little late to the avocado boat party (at least I didn’t miss the…boat) 😉 but better late than never! What a fab way to combine so many guilty pleasures (BBQ, bacon, cheese) and sneak in some nutrients, too.

A few weeks ago I shared that I got my first ever crock pot. Let me tell you we’ve been mass producing pulled chicken like nobody’s business. Seriously, I’m tempted to call the city and tell them they need to rezone our apartment lot from residential to commercial, because we’ve got a serious pulled chicken factory operating in full force over here.

As you can imagine, multiple batches of pulled chicken + two mouths = a lot of leftover chicken. Not that that’s a bad problem to have, just that I didn’t want to run into pulled chicken burnout, especially only a few weeks into owning a crock pot. These avocado boats were a welcome change from the standard pulled chicken sandwich and c’mon…any opportunity to eat bacon? Can’t pass that up.

Underneath that delish chicken is a brush of olive oil, a sprinkle of panko breadcrumbs for crunch, and a pinch of shredded cheddar. So far we’ve followed Ali’s 2-Ingredient Slow Cooker BBQ Chicken, which for real couldn’t be simpler, and we *love* it. If you don’t have a slow cooker – no judgment, that was me a few weeks ago. You can prepare chicken in your preferred method and then shred, or take an itty bitty short cut and use a rotisserie chicken.

Next I added bacon crumbles which are totally optional (as optional as bacon is in your house. In mine it’s mandatory) and slathered on some BBQ sauce. Spicy, mild, brown sugar, honey, Carolina, Kansas City, Texas, homemade, store bought, any and all. BBQ sauce. ♥

Then – more cheese! Duh. Throw ’em in the oven for a bit until the cheese melts and they’re heated and you’re all set to chow down. If you’re wondering what kind of pan I have them in, it’s a 9″ x 5″ loaf pan. The recipe below calls for two avocados, so four halves, which fit perfectly side-by-side in a loaf pan of that size! No chance these babies are rolling around and spilling any of that delicious filling. Not on our watch.

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