Chicken Broccoli Braid

We love love love this meal in our house. It's fancy looking but super easy to make. You could even make the filling ahead of time and then your prep would take less than five minutes.

This original recipe comes from Pampered Chef. I tasted it at a party once and have been making it ever since! I've concocted my own version over the years to make it even easier and suit our own tastes more (i.e. leaving out the dill which is not my fave at all!)

Ingredients:

3/4 cup Trader Joes tricolored frozen peppers (look like this)

1 bag steamable broccoli florets, 12oz (I buy Publix brand)

1 clove garlic, minced

1/2 tsp salt

3/4 cup mayo

1 can all-white-meat chicken, drained (or half rotisserie, or 1.5cups shredded chicken)

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

2 packages of crescent rolls, butter flake flavor

Directions:

If you have kids who are picky about veggies, you can heat the broccoli and peppers together in water for 5-7 minutes and then chop them all up into tiny pieces. I prefer to leave big chunks, which also makes the prep time faster and easier.

Place chicken in mixing bowl. Add salt, garlic, and mayo and mix. Heat broccoli (in the steamable bag) in the microwave for 4 minutes. Add to mixing bowl. Add frozen peppers and cheese. Mix everything together.

This next part sounds a lot more complicated than it is. I included pictures- that are terrible! sorry!- to make it easier to understand, but I promise after you do it once, it will take you no time at all.

Once the braid is complete, bake in the oven at 375 (I use convection on 350) for 15-18 minutes, or until golden brown.

Directions for Braid:

Open the crescent rolls long ways and roll out flat onto a rectangular baking sheet. This will give you four rectangles of dough. In each rectangle, cut four lines 3/4 of the way into the center so that you end up with 3 strips on each side of each rectangle. 

Lay the filling down the middle of the dough. Take one strip from each side, criss-cross or twist them once, and lay the excess in the middle.

Continue "braiding" all the way down.

There's usually two extra strips at the bottom which you may or may not choose to eat raw. ;) The Pampered Chef version adds an egg wash and slivered almonds at this point, but I don't usually fuss with this when it's just me and Matt eating. It does make a pretty finish if your serving company though!

Bake in the oven at 375 (I use convection on 350) for 15-18 minutes, or until golden brown.

Wah-lah! It's so yummy- I know you'll love it! ...and it looks like it was super hard to make, right?!

Winterfest Weekend in Monroe

This weekend, we traveled down to my parents' house for the Monroe Winterfest with my sister and her boys. We were there for a little less than 24 hours but crammed in a whole lot of fun on our short visit! Thankfully my sister brought her real camera and snapped all of these great pics. I think I need one of next month's goals to be remembering to use my real camera instead of always relying on my phone.

Noah and Maddox had no shame getting out and dancing to the DJ's music!

Ryan loves his Nonna!

...and his Aunt Gretchen!

Little buddy had quite an audience for his dinner and he loved it. 

Noah and Maddox wanted to take a bubble bath with Ryan so we stood really close and let them do it. In this pic poor Maddox just got smacked in the eye by Ryan's soapy hand!

Noah wanted to give Ryan the bottle and the sweet boo passed out in his arms. After he was finished, Noah asked if he could just snuggle with him for awhile before we took him to his crib to sleep. You better believe we said yes to that!

Also on our visit, we stopped off and said hello to Cindy- our favorite waitress at our favorite Mexican restaurant. You know you love Mexican when you have a favorite waitress who calls herself your son's aunt. Ryan was all smiles for his "Aunt Cindy!"

I have a full week of posts coming up this week now that I'm back working on my mac. The jury's still out on the whether the hard drive from my old laptop is recoverable or not, but I thankfully had most of the files and pictures backed up. And you better believe I'll be more intentional about remembering to back this one up more consistently!

Tomorrow I'll be back to share one of our favorite dinner recipes that looks fancy but is super easy. Here's a sneak peek:

See you then!