Chicken and Dressing

This is what I call a cheater meal.  It uses mainly packaged ingredients, which is why I call it a cheater.  One of those is condensed cream of mushroom soup, which I typically avoid using if possible.  But, this is quick to throw together and everyone likes it.   All you need to go with it is a salad or veggie.  I got this from a lady I have known since I got married, and have been making it almost that long (Oh, and hasn’t that been awhile!).  My kids love it and everyone I have ever served it to has asked for the recipe.

I have talked about how I sometimes change ingredients to try to make a dish a little more health friendly.  One of my favorite tricks is using greek yogurt in place of sour cream.  I have had much success with this.  I will tell you to be very careful doing this, as I have  a little story.

When you view the recipe, you will see that it calls for sour cream.  I had never tried the greek yogurt trick with this, being a little uncertain how it would work in this type of recipe.  So I have settled for reduced fat sour cream.  Recently when I made this, I got the chicken ready, the stuffing ready, and went to add the sour cream, only to discpver that the sour cream container had about 2 tablespoons in the bottom, and that was it.  Of course I went to the fridge – I was SURE i had just bought some.  Nothing.  Crap.  Oh look, greek yogurt.  Well, I figured no time like the present to try it.  Now, I typically by greek yogurt in the big industrial sized container, but recently I had run into a deal for a free single serving size which, when combined with my scrapings in the bottom of the sour cream container, should be enough to get me dinner.  So I grabbed that individual container, opened it, and spooned a big blob into the pan with the chicken.  Then I noticed an odd smell, almost fruity.  I started investigating, and found that my plain yogurt was not plain, but BLUEBERRY…..what to do now?  Well, the berries were all in the bottom of the container and I had just touched on a slightly purple area.  I scraped that off, then used the yogurt only from the top of the container.  It was pure white, no berries, okay I think I’m good.  I did NOT want to stop and go out to the store!  So I proceeded.  While it was baking, I kept thinking I could just smell a hint of that blueberry, but then not.  Oh well.  Well, understand that my husband DETESTS yogurt in any form (except in things like coffee cake, where you absolutely cannot tell it’s there).  He also typically eats A LOT of chicken and dressing.

So when we sat down to eat, I didn’t say a word.  We were about 3-4 minutes into eating when he said “this tastes kind of strange”.  I said “Really?  I didn’t notice anything.”  A few bites later he mentioned it again.  Again, I played innocent.  He finished most of what he had on his plate, and said he was done.  He did make one more mention that something just didn’t taste right.  He wasn’t interested in what I did with the leftovers.  They eventually went to the garbage.  I never mentioned it to him again.  To my knowledge, he still has no idea.  I did relate the story to my daughter the next day, laughing so hard I had tears rolling down my face.  My mother was amused by this as well.  They will keep my secret.

I see they now have an almost identical version on the stuffing package, different from the version they used to have.  They mix the veggies right into it.  I’d rather not.  I like my salad with it.  Once, when I was really stuck, (it was past time for a trip to the supermarket) I found that the only “healthy’ thing I had to go with it was cheese, so that’s what I did!  My kids loved it and from then on, cheese chunks have always been included with this.  My daughter told me recently she always serves cheese with it.

Anyway, if you have leftover cooked chicken you can chop up, it’s that much faster.  Or now you can grab a roast chicken from many of the big market deli’s, bring it home and cut some up to make this, then save the rest for quesadillas, or chicken tacos, or chicken salad or…..that list is almost endless.   Even if you have to cook the chicken, just fry it in a little butter with a lid on until juices run clear.  I like it browned a little but that isn’t necessary.