It may seem like I cook huge lavish meals all the time, but honestly, sometimes I just need to place something on the table fast. Enter the Chicken Roll Up!
Back when Dave and I first married, I knew very little about putting a meal on the table. In fact, what I did know wasn't good either; Dave liked to call me the Carbon Queen since I had a knack for burning things.
Those days are long gone, but this recipe from our early years has remained. It's been in my arsenal for so long for three reasons:
1) I almost always have the ingredients to make it in the house.
2) It throws together within minutes, often without measuring or looking at the recipe
3) It's good - or at least it tries to be. A meal like this is highly dependent on the taste of the basic ingredients, and whole grain breading, low fat dough and reduced fat cheese have been testing my abilities.
The idea of the recipe is this - you take some frozen chicken nuggets and wrap them inside crescent rolls with some barbecue sauce and cheese and bake it until brown. That't it - a serious no-brainer. But it's tasty and pairs well with any side dish or veggie. They are a staple around here - often for weekend lunches, since they're large enough to be a meal but small enough not to spoil dinner, if that's what you choose and only have one or two. The recipe makes 8 of them, and it would be super easy to double it if you needed to.
So some basic stuff you probably have in the house gets you started. The hardest part of the recipe is gently stretching out the dough so that it wraps all the way around everything you need to stuff in there! The dough can be sticky and it's prone to tear, but it's also forgiving and typically a few pinches will right any wrongs you may encounter.
Lay the dough out and dollop barbecue sauce towards the center of the bottom end. Top with a pinch of shredded cheese. The recipe calls for Monterey Jack and I always try to use that, although I'm sure cheddar would do just as fine here.
Once that is done, simply top with a frozen chicken nugget and wrap tightly, starting by folding the bottom ends over the nugget and rolling up, being careful to tuck in the sides and anything else that may try to escape.
The recipe calls for a quick baste of beaten egg wash and sesame seeds. I've skipped it when I've been in a super hurry, but if you do go ahead and use it, it will give your dough a nice shiny look and the sesame seeds make you look like a real chef. (insider's tip, right there!)
They get baked in a 375 degree oven for about 18 minutes - just enough time to get some side dishes or veggies together, and you have a quick, tasty meal that looks like you know what you're doing! (or at least that's the plan!)
I will tell you I had a friend who was not much of a BBQ fan, so she substituted mozzarella cheese and spaghetti/pizza sauce for the Monterey Jack cheese and barbecue sauce here and proclaimed it an utter disaster. Although it sounds good in theory, I'd imagine the high moisture content of any tomato based sauce coupled with the stringy consistency of melted mozzarella would fail under this dough.
But if you give it at try, I'd love to know if you made it work. I know this combo here does fine - and I urge you to give Chicken Roll Ups a go next time you need a fast meal!
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