Mysterious Chicken

The question "What's for supper?" was answered by "Nothing" and "I don't know." So I grabbed my basket and cane and hobbled to IGA in the rain after a hard day at the mine (craft store, actually.) Don't I have a hard life? They say stress makes you fat, so that's my excuse.

Believe it or not, the most economic meat in the meat display was beautiful chicken breasts, so I plopped them in my basket and headed home to prepare them for a late Monday night hockey game supper.

Unfortunately I never checked the cooking sauce section of my kitchen cupboard, for when I got home I found that I had no barbecue sauce, no teriyaki sauce....no anything to bring this meal up to a Food Network standard. So I hunted fridge, and I hunted cupboard, but the only bottle of stuff that tastes good I could find was Thousand Islands Salad Dressing.

Now, Howard hates it - it belongs on stuff he believes only rabbits should eat. And Neil hates anything with a mayonnaise base - I probably shouldn't mention it here, but his big brother used to chase him around the house with a bottle of mayo when he was little. But what the heck, these two were busy, face into a semi-final hockey game, and what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

Here is the pattern for the best ever Mystery Chicken - (I knit a lot...) -

Wash chicken and lay in oven-proof dish (plastic would melt.) Spread tons of Thousand Islands Dressing over chicken, turn over chicken and swish it around to cover as much as you can with the dressing. Add tons of onions and salt and pepper.

Cover and plop in 400 degree oven, as you want it to cook as quickly as possible - it's already after 7:00pm.

(When I checked in about 45 minutes, the dressing was still sitting whitely on the chicken. I knew Howard would think the chicken was baking in some kind of cream of something soup, and therefore would refuse to eat it, so I had to somehow darken and thin the dressing - so here comes the next step.)

Add 1/4 bottle of Teriyaki Cooking Sauce - which is as much as there was in the fridge door - and try as much as possible to mix it in with the salad dressing, to camouflage the colour and hopefully turn it into a sauce, disguised enough so the salad dressing will remain hidden.

Keep cookin' until the chicken is so nicely done everyone is pleased with it - because this mysterious sauce is such a hit that everyone just loved it. Tender, and great tasting! Who woulda thunk it - maybe I'll try out for Top Chef Canada.