Thanks to Kraft Pourables for sponsoring this post!
It’s a recurring theme in the conversations I have with my brother-in-law Sean who is a part-time chef and full-time dad: Where exactly do we draw the line between convenience food and healthy cooking? Because sometimes you just don’t have time to make everything from scratch, shuttle the kids to and from soccer practice, oversee the homework and get all the laundry done. Sometimes you just want to grab a bottle of store-bought salad dressing from the fridge and that’s all right.
He happened to be visiting the night I decided to crack open the new Kraft Fruit & Veg salad dressings that had been sent for this campaign. There was Berry Balsamic; Roasted Yellow Pepper, Garlic and Lime; Fire Roasted Tomato with Basil; and Garlic Parmesan with Roasted Cauliflower.
I poured a small amount of each into a small glass bowl and we took pinches of salad greens and dipped them in to taste. They all made tasty enough salad dressings, certainly, and the Kraft website is loaded with salad ideas I can’t wait to try out. But when Sean tasted the Fire Roasted Tomato with Basil dressing he said, “Oh, that would make a great marinade.”
And thus the tomato-basil chicken seed was planted in my mind.
Here’s how to make it:
- Put some chicken breasts in a dish and coat them with the Fire Roasted Tomato with Basil dressing. Or make your own marinade using oil and vinegar, basil and tomato paste and/or sun-dried tomatoes if you’d rather.
- Cover those and let them soak up all the flavour in the fridge while you prep the rest of the meal. I served the chicken with roasted sweet potatoes and steamed broccoli but whatever you have will work.
- Peel the sweet potatoes and cut them up into cube-ish kind of pieces and spread them out on a rimmed baking sheet. Drizzle with oil and salt and pepper and use your clean hands to toss the sweet potatoes so everything is properly coated. Pop them in a 400° oven for a good while. Like, pull them out and toss ’em around after 20 minutes or so and then put them back in for another 10 to 15 minutes. You want them to be nice and soft inside and, ideally, a little brown and crisp on the outside.
- Then prep your broccoli and put it in a steamer over a little water and lightly salt them. But don’t turn on the stove yet! These will only take a few minutes, so wait until everything else is just about done.
- As long as your chicken has had 20 minutes to a few hours to marinade, you’re good to start cooking it. I used a grill pan at first to get them started but soon realized the marinade would start to burn if I left them there to cook through. So I finished them in the oven next to my sweet potatoes. They were skinless and boneless and took about 25 minutes to cook. You could also do these on the barbecue if you’re lucky enough to have one that works. (Ours is more like an art installation on the idea of outdoor cooking. You can’t actually use it to cook with anymore.)
- The last important step is to drizzle a bit of the dressing on the plate before you place the chicken on it. Not only does this make you look all professional-style in front of your family and friends, it also makes for a very nice, saucy compliment to the marinated meat.
I have to admit, this meal was delicious. Everyone loved it, even my picky four-year-old.
This post is sponsored by Kraft. Opinions and words are still mine, of course.