Packet Chicken

Now this was good.

I was paging through a cookbook and happened to stumble across this recipe for chicken. It takes about 15 minutes of prep time, an hour to cook and the result was very tasty.

Start with a cookie sheet and line it with foil. Then pour 1/4 cup of barbecue sauce in a pile. On top of the sauce, place two chicken breasts. Roll them around in the sauce so each side is covered. The original recipe called for 4 chicken breasts in 1/4 cup of sauce. That's not enough sauce. You want sauce on all the breasts and just looking at 1/4 cup told me 4 breasts weren't going to get enough. Stick with 2 or double the amount of sauce if you're cooking four.

Peel and slice one potato and place on top of the chicken. Top that with a sliced pepper. The recipe called for a red pepper but I happen to have orange on hand. This would be excellent with all four colors of peppers in it.

Cover the chicken and vegetables with another 1/4 cup of barbecue sauce. Rip off another sheet of aluminum foil and cover this. Fold in the sides to make it tight. You've now got a packet that looks sort of like this. If you're really good, you can make it square. Mine is just an amorphous blob.

Bake it in a 350 oven for an hour. The recipe says 50 minutes and then check the chicken to see if it's done. As the steam escapes when you open this and then, if the chicken isn't done, it has to form steam all over again to finish cooking, I left the thing in the oven for an hour. Remove and open. Be careful. As I said, there's steam inside this packet or there should be if you've sealed it properly. Steam can burn you if you aren't careful.

Viola.

This was so good.

What I would do differently next time is to add spices to the chicken. The whole point of the cookbook I was looking through was to take everyday favorites and reduce their calories, sodium and fat. That is done with this recipe but the chicken still came out not as flavorful as I like. It would definitely benefit from the addition of garlic. If you like onions, I could see adding onions to this. Varying the flavor of the barbecue sauce would produce other tastes. The one hour cooking time was just perfect and keeping the packet completely sealed resulted in moist chicken. This recipe is not unlike my favorite hobo suppers, which are a cooked hamburger, potatoes, carrots, corn and peas wrapped in a foil packet.

I liked this. Quick, simple and, best of all, there was no mess to clean up. I put the second breast in a container for lunch the next day, balled up the foil and tossed it. I had just gotten the kitchen cleaned up from an earlier multi-step meal so a whole supper with minimal dishes makes me doubly happy.

Enjoy.

Beverage:  water

Deb