The Magical Bag of Chicken Breasts

Chicken breast can be completely ridiculous in price when purchased boneless and skinless. But if you’re anything like me, you want it fast and convenient.  While I can debone a chicken P.D.Q. I don’t want to do it.  Hooray for the bag o’ chicken breasts, my lifesaver.  It’s not very expensive and the chicken breasts, while not exactly top quality, are certainly wonderful in various recipes. If used wisely you can make just a few of these chicken breasts stretch into several different meals. 

Preparing the chicken breasts:

Take out 4 chicken breasts and place in a baking dish.  Take out a salad dressing, oil based like Italian or vinaigrette (Italian is best).  Should be a light version but whatever you have will do.  Baste the chicken breasts with the salad dressing.  Sprinkle a little garlic salt on the chicken breasts and bake in a 350 degree oven for about 20-25 minutes.  They should not be overcooked.  If it starts to look dry, take them out.  These do not take long to cook so watch them carefully. You should have quite a bit of juice run off, drain this and store it for other recipes.  Set the breasts aside to cool.

Once cool, hand shred the chicken breasts.  No food processors allowed, I’m afraid, you want long strands of meat.  This is not a truly laborious process but I could think of several things I’d rather be doing.  Still it’s worth the work and you can do it while watching tv.

Now that you’ve gotten them shredded separate the meat into 3 more or less equal parts and store in containers until ready to use.  Now that you’ve got them, what do you do with them?  The following recipes use a portion of shredded chicken each.