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!

Nachos!

I love nachos and for the longest time if you asked me what my favorite food was, I'd say chicken nachos.(A special shout out to Havana's in Norfolk for especially tasty ones!) I'd make them with Perdue short cuts or leftover chicken, sometimes adding onions or jalapeños or green chiles.  In more recent years I have come to appreciate the untraditional nacho. Finn McCool's has BBQ chicken nachos that I really enjoyed. So one night, we had some leftover pulled pork BBQ and we thought, "what about nachos?"

Being a nacho novice, I have always put down some tortilla chips, piled on some meat and piled on the cheese. Flavor was great...on the chips that had meat AND cheese. Then I saw an episode of Good Eats and watched Alton Brown make his nachos and I paid special attention to how he layered the nachos and made sure each chip had toppings. I tried that the next time and although it took a little more work, the effort was worth it. I also noticed that a light layer of shredded cheese, then meat and then more cheese keeps toppings from sliding off.

I continuously experiment with types of chips, cheeses and toppings. For chips, the heartier yellow corn, blue corn and stone ground chips work really well. We have also really enjoyed using the Flax seed tortilla chips from Trader Joe's. We like the pork BBQ with shredded Mexican blend and a little BBQ sauce sprinkled on top. We have recently used my pulled chicken BBQ as a topping, adding lettuce, sour cream and jalapenos right out of the oven. Homemade chili goes great with Pepper Jack or a very sharp cheddar and steak goes well with mozzarella, extra steak seasoning and a little onion. And finally, buffalo chicken with blue cheese and garnished with chopped celery....yummmm. Try some combinations and share what you find!