I recently made lasagna with tomato sauce using the recipe I posted here My First Tomato Sauce Lasagna. So yes, I use jarred sauce because otherwise I would never make the lasagna because I am kinda not a big fan of tomatoes so I know I would not make a good sauce. I like this one (pictured). I didn’t use the whole jar though. I didn’t measure either. I just put what I thought was about three cups or more, but I wanted to save a little sauce for pasta. We don’t usually have pasta with red/tomato sauce, because . . . . well, you know. But the other night I was trying to figure out what to have for dinner. I had just cooked ground turkey and if it were just me, I could eat that almost every night, but recently I was told by my husband that he could not. So . . . . there was chicken in the freezer, but it was not in a marinade bag so . . . .what to do? Then I remember that ol’ recipe where you pour tomato sauce over the chicken and top it with cheese. Just like the Salsa Chicken, I had never done that because . . . . well, you know. So I decided to try it because it would be something new to us even though it is an old recipe. So I made Tomato Sauce Chicken, I think of it as Italian Chicken.
So easy and so good, just like the Salsa Chicken. This time I had what I think of as regular chicken breast (instead of the thin ones I had for the Salsa Chicken), but I decided to cut them up into smaller pieces because I was going to serve them over pasta. I didn’t have that much sauce, but that was fine with me. After I made it and ate it, I realized that I probably could have been eating something like it all along as long as I hadn’t followed the recipe and drown the meat in tomato sauce. The little bit I had and used was perfect, to me.
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Italian Chicken
Two Chicken breast, cut into pieces
Poultry spice
garlic salt
3/4 cup (or so) Tomato Sauce
3/4 cup (or so) Shredded Cheese
Pasta (cooked to you liking)
Preheat the oven to 350° F. Spread out the chicken pieces in a baking dish. Sprinkle the chicken with the poultry spice and garlic salt. Bake for 10 minutes. Take the dish out of the oven and turn each piece of chicken over. Sprinkle the chicken with the poultry spice and garlic salt. Spread the tomato sauce over each piece of chicken. If you LIKE tomato sauce use more. Then top each piece of chicken with cheese. Bake until chicken is done to your liking. I baked it for 10 more minutes. Turned off the oven and let it sit for 10 more minutes.
I served it over linguine. I put some of the tomatoes and the “juice” on the pasta.
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Yes, this recipe is easy. And yes, you can figure it out on your own. You can add and subtract, but sometimes do you just need ideas? You need a starting point? I do. I actually have always thought about trying this but my dislike of tomatoes kept me from doing it. But now I am more tolerant of them. I would imagine it would be really good with mozzarella cheese, but we had the Mexican Blend type of shredded cheese. And that was actually really good.
The chicken we buy from Costco is packaged in twos and they are rather large so we have enough for another meal. Yeah . . . you probably know I love leftovers as much as you know I don’t really like tomatoes.
So what are you having for dinner tonight?
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