Cranberries make the Christmas Chicken recipe delicious! Photo by Georg Ebs
As a housewife, you sometimes need a meal that looks great, is tasty, and comes together quickly. For those days you feel like eating out, but can’t afford to. Or when a friend from church gets sick and you want to take a meal to them that doesn’t take all day to make.
This chicken recipe is called “Christmas Chicken” because of the red cranberries that make up part of the sauce, but you can use this recipe any time of the year!
Ingredients:
- Chicken breasts, chicken pieces or chicken tenders
- 1 can whole cranberry sauce
- 1 bottle French salad dressing
- 1 envelope onion soup mix
To make this sweet-and-sour type sauce for your chicken, mix the French salad dressing, the can of cranberries, and one envelope of onion soup mix together in a bowl. When you’re ready to cook the chicken, simply pour half of the sauce mixture over the chicken.
Cooking Time – Cooking time varies according to the type of chicken you are using. If you use boneless, skinless chicken tenders, you may only need to cook for about 20 minutes. If you use whole breasts and thigh chunks with bones still in them, you may need to cook over an hour.
I usually set my oven for 325 degrees Fahrenheit and cook until the chicken is over 160 degrees according to my meat thermometer. Cut into the largest piece and you should see clear juices run with no pink tinge. I like to reserve half of the sauce to put over the chicken when I take it out so it will look pretty and create a little dipping spot of sauce. But then, I’m a tad bit strange sometimes.
Alternative Dishes With Christmas Sauce
The brilliant thing about this sauce is that you can put it over several different meats. Leftover turkey 3 days after Thanksgiving takes on a new life with the Christmas Chicken Sauce. Fish fillets are delicious.
Keeping Ingredients Ready On-Hand
The best part of this recipe is that I can keep all the ingredients on-hand in my pantry ready to go at a moment’s notice. If the phone rings at 4pm and I find out there’s a new arrival to celebrate because someone had a baby, I can pull everything out of the pantry and have this meal assembled, cooked and delivered by 5pm! Brilliant! I’m all about easy-peasy when it comes to cooking.
Looking for more Quick and Easy Recipes? Try these!
