Hi, friends!
I just have a really quick little recipe that I want to share with you today. I find myself making this over and over again. It’s one of those things that looks like I really put in an effort to make a delicious home-cooked meal, but takes almost no effort at all! I made it last week and this time I happened to remember to take a few pictures while it was cooking. No fancy, well-styled and garnished beauty shot photos for this one, once you taste it though, I’m sure you’ll agree this recipe is so great that it doesn’t need any of that.
You’ll need:
-A few chicken breasts (frozen is fine)
-About 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
-About 1 teaspoon of garlic powder
-About 1 teaspoon of onion powder
-About 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
-About 1/2 cup or more of California salad dressing
Sometimes you’ll see the California dressing called “Catalina”, but I just had a bottle of generic store brand stuff on hand. This is a pretty popular dressing and a lot of people have a bottle of this hanging around somewhere. In my head I just call it “salad ketchup” because that’s pretty much what it looks like to me.
It’s delightful stuff though!
All of the amounts I mentioned above are total approximations. All you do is cover however many chicken breasts you’re using in the dressing and then sprinkle a bit of the other stuff over top. Don’t go crazy on the cayenne though or you’ll burn your mouth off. Just a dash will do it. It should look like this-ish.
Let it cook away on low all day, about 6-8 hours or so. About an hour before you want to eat, spoon a bit of the nicely thickened sauce from the crock pot back over the tops of the chicken breasts and let it continue to cook.
When it’s dinner time, you’ll have something that looks like this!
That’s good stuff! This is a great satisfying weeknight dinner with a unique flavor that’s just perfect for when you want to toss something in the crock pot, but don’t have a lot of extra ingredients on hand to make some of your crock pot favorites.
I could say that you should serve it with some mashed potatoes and a nice crisp salad and that would be fine, but the truth is, I usually just boil a bit of rice and nuke some frozen veggies and call it done. Still delicious!
Let me know if it passes the test with your family!
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.