Making Magic with Frozen Chicken!

Every once in a while I make a purchase at the grocery store that was fueled by a great deal but with little planning on my part. The grocery store recently had a buy one get one of a 5 pound bag of skinless, boneless chicken. Imagine my surprise when I went to open them for an emergency chicken situation (that makes me laugh to type that! Really I had no thawed chicken on hand and had promised two picky eaters at my table grilled chicken for dinner since they weren’t feeling that night’s turkey burgers) and discovered they were FROZEN TENDERS NOT BREASTS. And let me say, after thawing them slightly and grilling them for the “situation” I had no way to cook these things to put them to any good use…or so I thought.

Fast forward to a request for chicken nachos placed on the menu and again…no chicken. (Still not sure how that happened. We always have chicken...we also have chicken typically on our menu 3 nights a week so perhaps there in lies the problem!) Anyway, surprisingly I never threw those frozen tenders away and reading the package (AGAIN) the instructions say they can be rinsed in hot water to remove the ice and then cooked in a pan.

Following the instructions I rinsed the remaining tenders (probably about 4 pounds) in their plastic bag and then heated some olive oil in a large nonstick pan. I added the tenders and began cooking them…and was quickly less than pleased with the results. Faced with white sautéed tenders that didn’t look good for anything let alone nachos, I remembered a recipe I had found and clipped from a magazine (and of course can't get my hands on now!) and prepared years ago that called for cooking the chicken first and then grinding it up for nachos! So I finished cooking the chicken, allowed it to cool and used my food processor to create this:

I added this back to the original pan along with cumin, chili powder and one can of Rotel tomatoes and green chiles.

Then I built my nachos like I always do chips, cheese, meat and more cheese.

And this time I dressed them up extra special with sour cream and lettuce. 

What’s even better is that there was enough chicken left over to make some tasty wraps for everyone the next night!Good thing I have one bag of frozen tenders left to use!