Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Quick, Easy, Healthy: Italian Chicken

One way to cut down on time in the kitchen for me is to have my husband cook dinner on the grill. It's O.K. -- he likes cooking on the grill, and I don't ask him to do it every night. For those nights, when fancy planning is out of the question, here's a go to grill recipe. Although all of them are easy, I'll put them in categories of good, better and best.

GOOD (Quickest and Somewhat Healthy):
Buy a bag of chicken tenderloins and a bottle of Italian salad dressing (please no HFCS or MSG!). Dump the dressing on the chicken the night before or for a few hours before grilling. Hand the bag to your husband and have him grill them.

BETTER (Quick and Healthier):
Buy some free-range chicken breasts (Preferably ones that were previously free-range. If they are still "ranging", this recipe probably won't qualify as quick.) and some healthy, bottled Italian dressing. Prepare the same way as the GOOD option above.

BEST (Still pretty Quick and Healthiest):
Use your free-range, antibiotic-free (etc.) chicken breasts and make this Italian dressing. Prepare the same way as the GOOD option above.

Disclaimer: This recipe was tested in my kitchen on our grill which wasn't quite presentable enough to include a photo of. The amount of servings depends on how hungry my kids are and the preparation time depends on the number of diaper blowouts, sibling spats and rescue-the-baby-from-consuming-refrigerator-magnets drills.

4 comments:

  1. I finally figured out that I could give my husband meat for the week and get it all cooked in one shot! What a time saver!

    By the way... Money Saving Mom also does a receipe like this, but she dumps the chicken and dressing in a crockpot. :)

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  2. So how exactly do you do the meat for the whole week? Sounds interesting!

    I'd love to do it in the crockpot, but my husband likes grill and oven only for some reason. :-(

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  3. Well, in my case it's mainly chicken. We had a cookout/birthday party on Saturday where my husband was grilling burgers for our guests. Since he was going to be out there anyway, I figured I'd thaw a whole bag of chicken breasts, dump barbeque all over them and let him grill those all up. I shred them or dice them for wraps and such.

    But, the idea can carry over for anything. Extra chicken, burgers, sausage, potatoes, veggies, etc. It's kind of like freezer cooking. If you're going to make something anyway, make it double and save yourself some time! Some of it could certainly be frozen to be used later or just make what you can use before it goes bad. :)

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  4. Sounds great! Maybe I'll try that.

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