Quick, healthy, tasty chicken dish

I don’t have a name for this so you’ll have to make one up.
Ingredients are as follows:

• 1 cup rice (I prefer basmati or jasmine)
• Water
• 2 tbsp Jamison’s chicken flavored soup base (my personal favorite)
• 2 tbsp Goya Sofrito
• 1 tbsp Olive Oil
• 1/2 lb chicken cubed(will describe in a moment)
• Veggies (fresh or frozen or both)
• 1/4 cup shredded cheddar.

Directions:

I am a cheater. I don’t care who knows it, (except my old chef but I think he secretly uses one at home too) I use a rice cooker. It makes my life so much easier when I don’t have to deal with it. Throw it in the cooker and let it work its magic and I am happy.That little confession made, lets get to the cookin’.

• Put your cup of rice into the cooker (you can do this the traditional method too, nothing changes except your effort into it)
• Boil some water (about 3 cups for spillage). I use my tea kettle, but if you have a microwave that will work fine, even a pot.
• In your liquid measuring cup, put the soup base, Sofrito, and olive oil.
• Add the boiling water and mix well.  We did this because you don’t want too much more liquid than what is needed for the rice.
• Add this mixture to your rice and cook away.

I mentioned the chicken earlier. I think I have talked about this before, but I will go over it again for the n00bs.(You can be an FNG if you want, I am still gonna like you either way). I get boneless skinless chicken breast tenderloins from the super market in the frozen (IQF) 3lb packages. It makes my life easy even if I know it is cheating. I still get the bone-in, skin-on thighs for my more flavorful cooking, but this is supposed to be simple.

While my rice was cooking, I took 3 of these tenderloins from the freezer and put them under cold running water to thaw them. Then I pulled some brocolli and chopped it down to small mouthful sizes. When the rice was done, my chicken was thawed. I made two cuts along the length and then 1/2 inch slices to cube the chicken. I tossed the rice into a baking pan (9″ square, but use what you have) with the chicken, the brocolli, some frozen mixed veggies, and the cheese.  Cover this with foil and bake at 350 degrees for about 25-30 min and you have a wonderful dish for two or for one with leftovers.

And, Voila:

In case you don’t know

 

Just so’s you know, I usually make this dish with leftover plain rice that has been in the fridge a couple of days.  This works great, but you have to add 1 cup of the liquid described above to the mix before baking.
And that is that.  Good meal, healthy and easy.

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