CHERRY CHICKEN

Cherry Chicken served with a Mashed Potato Sundae

Haven’t we all been there? You don’t need to have your own kids to know the frustration of trying to find something that your little loved ones will eat. At least parents have some leverage. Not so with aunts, uncles, GRANDMAS. What are we left to do when we have cleared out half the refrigerator and still not found something that our precious someone is going to eat. You can’t send them home hungry! Some parents somehow manage to bestow on their children a liking for a large variety of foods. Their kids may not like everything, but they have a reasonable number of food groups to choose from when getting ready to prepare them a meal. Did I say food groups? I don’t have to go far to find a precious loved one who has a food group of ONE! Is mac and cheese a food group? Yes it is, when it comes to my granddaughter Danielle. She is an adult now but remains forever loyal to her mac and cheese. Thankfully, her acceptance of other foods has, ever so slightly grown as she has gotten older. But it’s still true that if I want to stock up on something she will eat, I have to buy boxed macaroni and cheese. I gave up eating mac and cheese from a box a long time ago and would never feed it to may precious “peanut” if I had the choice. Unfortunately, the choice is not mine. My hopes that she would someday outgrow this obsession, have been dashed. I have introduced her to some of the finest restaurants in the Northeast, only to have her order macaroni and cheese. She must not be riding alone on the mac and cheese train, because the restaurants have had it on the menu. It has been very interesting to see what an upscale eating establishment can do to jazz up this simple meal. One of our favorite fine restaurants, with a bend toward French food, serves their mac and cheese with truffle oil in a stunning, covered, single serving dish that looks like a Faberge egg. While I must accept that some things never change, my Danielle, and her most discriminating pallet, may have found her kryptonite. A boyfriend that cooks!! 😉 You go Nate. The ball is in your court. You got this!

Ricky’s picky eater was his daughter Leah, when she was young. He was not willing to admit defeat when it came to getting her to eat, at least some, wholesome food at dinnertime. Ricky loves to feed people. It’s in keeping with his approach to cooking, that he experimented with different ways to disguise good food, to get Leah to eat it. This dinner recipe for cherry chicken was one of his successes. It’s such a good example of thinking out of the box, when it comes to tailoring your menu to suit your family’s food preferences. In this recipe, Ricky simply added a splash of maraschino cherry juice to the skillet when Leah’s chicken tenders were cooked. This chicken tender recipe, from a nutritional standpoint, far outshines today’s popular breaded and fried tenders, that you would commonly get as take out or buy premade to heat up. And those alternatives are no easier to get on the table than this recipe, with real food, no fillers or preservatives. The protein is up front and center when your little one bites into the tender. During our cooking and photo session for this recipe, the cherries in the bottle gave me the idea of a mashed potato sundae. As luck would have it, I had some leftover from the night before. It hasn’t been kid tested yet. But I hope it’s as successful as Ricky’s cherry chicken has been. If you have any luck, we would love to hear from you. Maybe you have a recipe of your own that tricks your little ones to eating something good for them. We would love to post them.

Often when I am working with one of Ricky’s dinner recipes, I wonder if the recipe I am working on, is the easiest recipe so far. It’ s always a toss up. Most of them are easy. But in any case, this recipe is a ribbon winner for being easy.

Here’s what YOU WILL NEED:

This is a pretty simple ingredients list, to be sure. But there is something worth noting. With food costs steadily rising, it’s a good idea to look more closely at the value of what you buying. In a previous post, I wrote about how much has changed in the world of serving chicken for dinner. At one time, boneless, skinless, chicken breast was a top shelf purchase. The average person would consider it a splurge to buy chicken breast that had the bone and skin removed for you. Now, boneless skinless chicken breast can be the least expensive thing in the meat case. Why??? Chicken wings. Wings are everywhere. There is a huge demand for chicken wings and the price of them has soared, as popularity has. There are only two wings on a chicken. That leaves a whole lot of other parts of that chicken, that suppliers need to get rid of, so they sell it cheap. So how does this tie into cherry chicken? Chicken tenders are nothing more than sliced up boneless breast meat. Take a look at the difference in price between the two when you are buying tenders. The tenders can be dollars more expensive then the boneless breast. If you aren’t going to use all the breast meat now, freeze it for another meal. There is NO work to making a breast into a few tenders. You just cut slices. Save your money.

This is WHAT TO DO:

Melt the butter or margarine in a skillet on medium heat. Add the chicken tenders and fry on medium heat until they are cooked through. Since the tenders are so thin, they cook in only a few minutes and it is easy to tell when they are done. Once they are cooked, spoon a little of the bottled cherry juice over the tenders and remove them from the heat.

Ricky doesn’t soak the tenders in the red juice, he just adds a little bit. The juice mixes in with the butter in the skillet. Maraschino cherry juice has a pretty strong taste, so you don’t want to overpower the chicken with that flavor. You may defeat your purpose. Yes, the juice is sweetened. It’s the sweetness and color that will help entice your kids to eat. There is a lot of truth to the phrase; “A spoonful of sugar, helps the medicine go down”. If a spoonful of cherry juice gets some chicken and mashed potato from plate to belly, you may agree it is worth it.

Dig in Kids