D is for Disaster of Chicken Proportions [A-Z Challenge 2015]

Experiments From Auntie's Test Kitchen

Intro  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Conclusion



                                                                                                                    

D is for Disaster of Chicken Proportions

I appreciate the fact that food companies often print recipes on the labels of their products.  However, I think these should be thoroughly tested, not just slapped on a label for us poor saps who don't cook well.

Ragu, the name conjures images of plates of pasta piled high, covered with meat and a yummy sauce you didn't have to make from scratch.  Never overly expensive, I've eaten Ragu pasta sauce since I was a kid.  As I was reading the label (yes, I actually do that sometimes) on a jar of Alfredo Sauce, I saw this:

Doesn't this sound like crispy, cheesy, tomato-y goodness?

Well...

The first order of business was to get a pan big enough for this recipe.  As you will recall from this recipe, my 9 x 9 glass baking pan is too small for most recipes that feed more than one person.  So, off to the Wal-Mart I go for a standard size glass baking dish.

The next order of business was to follow this recipe to the letter, except despite cutting the chicken breasts in half butterfly style, it took longer than the last 10 minutes for the chicken to be thoroughly cooked, plus it takes more than a quarter cup of sauce to coat that much chicken.

The smell coming from the oven was yummy.  The finished product looked as good as it smelled.

However...

Every bite was worse than the last one:  Instead of a crispy filet blanketed by tomato cheesiness, it was flavorless, textureless, and nausea producing.  Being quite hungry, I ate most of what was on my plate.  My thinking was that maybe it would taste better the next day--what we southerners call lettin' it set.  It did not help; this mess tasted just as bad as the day before.  I hated to do it, but I threw the majority of it in the trash.

Might as well cut out the middle man.

Hold up!  How the Sam Hill can a southern woman mess up chicken?  By following this recipe, apparently.  To be fair, I've gotten some really good recipes from food labels.  This just wasn't one of them.  The difficulty is that I can't figure what went wrong.  My only correction is to toss the recipe permanently.

Well, on to trying something else.