Chicken Cordon Bleu….you know the taste – first that crispy crunch of a just right breadcrumb crust hugging a juicy chicken breast wrapped around smokey sweet ham and tangy swiss cheese. Hashtag swoon! I do love to make chicken cordon bleu and my hubby sure loves to eat it, but sometimes there just isn’t time for all the steps to do it perfectly…and then sometimes I just want to change things up…and then sometimes I just want to make a casserole! So one day I came up with this one and it fits the bill on flavor, function and family friendliness – a triple win in my book!
Necessities:
4 cups cooked brown rice (You know I love my Trader Joe’s precooked brown rice and it comes in handy here again)
1 cup cauliflower rice* (optional, if you omit it from the recipe you do not need to replace it with anything)
2 cups chopped cooked chicken (a perfect use for my Perfectly Roasted Chicken Breasts)
2 cups Mock Condensed Soup (you can use canned condensed soup)
4 oz chopped Swiss cheese (about 1 cup, but you can use more if you are a big cheese fan)
4 oz chopped ham (about 1 cup, I used Boars Head from the deli that I just chopped up)
*What is Cauliflower Rice?
It is pretty awesome stuff! My dear friend Annette introduced me to this stuff and since then I have never looked back! It is basically just cauliflower chopped up in a food processor into really small rice like pieces, thus the name cauliflower rice, or as all the hip kids say cauli-rice. You can make it yourself, but why bother when you can buy it at Trader Joe?! You can play with the proportions in this recipe. I only add 1 cup so that it 1. doesn’t water down the dish and 2. doesn’t over power it with cauliflower flavor. Now run out and buy some – it’s really good eats!
Method:
This is a REALLY easy one! Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Now just dump everything into a big bowl and mix, mix, mix. Time Saving Tip: Leave the rice and cauliflower rice frozen.
Then pour the mixture into a casserole dish – a 9×13 works great, I just happened to use a pretty blue one that I have. Bake for 30-40 minutes and then remove and allow to cool for 10 minutes before serving. I served ours with a quick spinach salad and it was a perfect weeknight meal. If you want to go and get fancy you can sprinkle the top with buttered breadcrumbs during the last 5 minutes of baking and it will be oh so delicious – but that’s just for show offs 😉
