I tried out this recipe when we had a bad snowstorm and I had to make do with what I had on hand, including some boneless chicken thighs. I will say again: stop buying boneless chicken breasts and buy these instead. They are so much better and cost so much less. They are every bit as good as white meat and they don’t dry out. If you think your family won’t eat them, just serve them up and don’t say anything. I can (almost) guarantee that no one will know the difference except to say, ‘Hey Mom/Honey, these are really great!”
chicken
A Great Alternative to Pasta Casserole
For many years my family enjoyed something called “Chiquita’s Chicken,” a recipe we’d gotten from a magazine article by the redoubtable Peg Bracken, author of the I Hate To Cook Book. The article had a little booklet of recipes included which we apparently didn’t keep, although we did write down the one by Chiquita.. I remember that there was something called “Hao Nao Brown Kao” made with ground beef and vaguely Hawaiian or Chinese or some such, and another item called “Gloria’s Good Goulash.” I found HNBK on cooks.com but the other two are lost to posterity. (At least under their original names. Chiquita, whoever she may have been, apparently cribbed her recipe from an almost-identical one for “King Ranch Chicken,” which is very well known.) Since Chiquita’s Chicken relies heavily on canned soup, I looked for something a little more upscale to replace it and found the following. The cream of mushroom soup has been replaced by sour cream and cream cheese, so I guess that’s progress. The cream of chicken soup stayed. The original recipe called for the chicken and cream cheese to be rolled up in individual corn tortillas, something I refuse to do. Any time you’re asked for something that fiddly, just do layers instead. (There are quite a few other fiddly things I do, such as the individual mini-tart shells, but at least there’s some point to them.) So here’s my recipe, adapted from Taste of Home magazine.