Chicken dinner recipe is a winner

Published 9:06 am Saturday, May 6, 2017

One Saturday, the question of the day was “What do you want for supper?”

Brad asked what his choices were and I said beef, pork or chicken. He chose chicken.

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Before heading to the grocery store early that morning, I ran downstairs and got a package of boneless chicken breasts out of the freezer.

This particular weekend, we were going to have some family over for lunch on Sunday and I was doing all the preparation on Saturday.

I had made a strawberry pie and a chocolate chip pie when I thought “What in the world am I going to do with that chicken?”

It was a beautiful day and I thought about grilling out. Then I thought better of it because I had so much to do to get ready for Sunday; not only was I getting as much food prepared as I could, I also needed to clean and straighten the house.

I pulled out my chicken recipe folder and started quickly going through it and found today’s recipe, which comes from tasteofhome.com.

I picked this recipe because it didn’t require many ingredients, wouldn’t dirty too many dishes, and I could fix it in the Crock-Pot.

I looked at my watch and I had time to get the recipe together and get it in the crock pot and supper would be on the table around 6:30 p.m.

I had only thawed three pieces of chicken, so I cleaned it and put it in the Crock-Pot. I opened the cabinet and pulled out the maple syrup — there was not much in the bottle. I dug around in the cabinet and found one of those little bottles of maple syrup you get at Cracker Barrel. I poured both into a measuring cup and had a little more than half of what I needed. So I dug around the cabinet a little bit more and found dark Karo syrup and some Sorgum.

I wasn’t going to go back to town just to get maple syrup, so I decided to use equal amounts of both the Karo and the Sorgum to get to a half cup of syrup. I don’t know if brown mustard is the same thing as stone-ground mustard, but that’s what I had so I just used it.

When I found this recipe, I purchased quick-cooking tapioca and sure enough there it was, right in the bottom of the cabinet.

After mixing the three ingredients, I poured it over the chicken and stirred it around a little to get the sauce all over the chicken. I was skeptical that this chicken would be done in four hours so I set the Crock-Pot on high for about 45 minutes then turned it down on low to finish cooking.

The recipe said to serve this chicken with brown rice, but I didn’t have brown rice. You guessed it, I fixed wild rice for Brad and white rice for me.

When it was time for us to eat, the kitchen was a wreck from all the prepping I was doing; but I got supper on the table, Brad blessed the food and we began to eat.

Even though I didn’t have the exact ingredients called for in this recipe it was delicious. Brad and I both gobbled it up. Brad asked what was in the sauce and when I told him tapioca he asked what it was for. I told him I assumed it was the thickener. When we were cleaning up the table, Brad said he thought the sauce would be just as good without the tapioca and said next time to leave it out and see what happens. He wasn’t crazy about the texture the tapioca added.

So as you probably have figured out, this chicken recipe is a winner. I nailed it and it’s in my self-made cookbook, along with a note to leave the tapioca out next time.

Looking back, you could make this a one-pot wonder — just mix the sauce up in the crockpot then add the chicken and stir.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

About Whitney Leggett

Whitney Leggett is managing editor of The Winchester Sun and Winchester Living magazine. To contact her, email whitney.leggett@winchestersun.com or call 859-759-0049.

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