Food Storage Recipes: Catalina Chicken

This is a recipe that Julie taught me one Mother’s Day several years ago. We were planning a dinner for my mom (the infamous Grandma Lori) and she popped out this way easy and way delicious recipe that his since become a staple in my family. In fact, last night when I made it my kids snarfed it up without one single complaint (if you know my kids you will know how rare that is). Without further ado … here is the recipe!

Catalina Chicken (from the kitchen of Julie)

Ingredients:
1 small jar of apricot/pineapple preserves
1 small bottle of catalina salad dressing
1 1/2 – 2 lbs diced chicken

Directions:
Mix the sauce in a 9×13 pan. Add in the diced chicken. Let marinade for several hours if you can, but it’s not necessary. Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes or until chicken is cooked. Serve over rice.

I TOLD YOU IT WAS EASY!!!!

Variations

Meat
The only problem with this recipe is it calls for diced chicken. In my current state (5 months pregnant) I find it completely nauseating and cumbersome to have to thaw, trim, and chop raw chicken. It dawned on me that if I had some bottled chicken on hand, I could just open up a bottle and have this recipe ready to go in less than 5 minutes. This re-motivated me to work on one of my New Year’s Resolutions and break open my new pressure canner as soon as chicken goes on sale again.

Jam
While I used some jam from the LDS cannery, you can use any apricot preserves but it’s definitely the best with pineapple. If I have cans of pineapple on hand it’s also yummy to add in a few pineapple chunks too.

Rice
I am ashamed to admit this, but even though I have tried Julie’s magical tips on How to Cook Rice it STILL never works very well for me. In an emergency I will suffer through crunchy or mushy rice … but for day to day cooking I have admitted my failings and have started to use the rice cooker I got for Christmas (apparently my husband was a bit disappointed in my rice cooking skills too). I figure at least it’s better than relying on Minute Rice 🙂