Country Club Chicken: A Little Bite of Heaven

The finished product, ready to serve!

One recipe I found on Pinterest has become a quick favorite in our home, Country Club Chicken. The first time I made it was when my parents were visiting. They fell in love with it. They asked me to email the recipe to them, and reminded me when they were on the road home back to Florida.

Last night, I made it for a second time. Making it was more of a challenge this time around. After all, last time I had 3 additional adults to help keep my children distracted as I made dinner. This time I just had my DH who was holding our napping baby, who is seriously resistant to napping anywhere except our arms. My lovely and energetic toddler took advantage of this situation by staying as close to me as possible, getting seriously underfoot. So, as I prepped, I felt my blood pressure rise. Not the ideal situation for cooking much of anything. However, I did what I could.

This recipe does require a bit of prep work. Unfortunately, instead of paying attention to the cooking description given by Kayote Kitchen (see the link above), I just printed out the printable version and went from there. If I had gone over her actual instructions, I wouldn't have gotten the wrong type of mushrooms. Instead, I looked at the ingredient list and and when I saw 7 oz of mushrooms, I assumed she meant canned. She did not. I had forgotten this from the first time I made it. Seeing as I didn't have any fresh mushrooms on hand, I ended up using canned instead. Lesson learned: read all of the recipe before shopping for ingredients.

The sauteed onions, canned mushrooms (but fresh is best),
apples, and bacon with the soup being added.

Anyhow, to get started you need to mince 1 large onion and 1 apple (Golden Delicious works well), as well as clean and slice your mushrooms. The first time I did the recipe, I used pre-sliced mushrooms from the grocery store, 8 oz instead of the 7 oz she has in her recipe. Not a huge change in the least. Besides, more mushrooms is not a bad thing. While you are prepping these ingredients, you will need to fry 4-5 slices of bacon, then cut it into smaller pieces. Now, the first time I did this, my bacon was bad so I used real bacon bits/pieces. It actually worked nicely in the recipe, although fresh is usually best.

Once the bacon is done, put a couple of tablespoons of unsalted butter in the pan to melt. Then, brown the about 4 seasoned (salt & pepper) chicken breast. Basically, you want it to look brown on the outside, but not be cooked on the inside. After that is done, you put the chicken in a casserole, and add the onion to the pan. I won't go into a lot of detail here, because you can get it more in depth on her page. When the onion, mushrooms, and apple is done cooking you will be adding cream of mushroom soup as well as white wine and the bacon. Kayote Kitchen mentions using Unox soup. I've never heard of that brand nor is there any chance that my small town grocery store (nor our nearby small city one) would carry it. I used her suggested substitute (2 cans of Campbell's), and it worked great. The last thing you add is sharp cheddar. Her pictures show her adding white cheddar. I used yellow sharp cheddar. Stir the ingredients well then pour the sauce on top of the chicken.

Ready to go in the oven!

You will then put the casserole in a 350 oven. Of course, I had to remove my toddler who had crawled between my legs and blocked my oven access. I removed her to a laundry basket she had dragged into the kitchen. Once that was done, I let the chicken cook for 30 minutes.

My toddler in the laundry basket after having to
remove her from blocking the oven.

This recipe goes great with pasta (spaghetti was suggested, but we use penne because that works best for toddler fingers). I would also think it would work with rice.

Another successful pin from Pinterest, and one I highly recommend! :)