Peach Chicken

~Amanda~

Everyone has their favorite meals and depending on what stage of life we’re in, they are continually changing. Growing up, my all time favorite meal was this Peach Chicken. I would request it for every birthday and every special occasion and every weeknight if I could! The combination of the baked honey peach and ginger chicken with warm peaches filled with sour cream (I know, it sounds weird) topped with flaked coconut is so incredibly delicious. We haven’t had this meal in so many years and I don’t know what made me think of it one day a few weeks ago, but I suddenly had a huge craving for it and I absolutely had to make it, so I had my mom dig out the old recipe so I could recreate it!

I have never made this on my own before and never actually seen the recipe before and when she sent over the scanned copy of it to me, I couldn’t help but laugh a little bit about how dated it was! She said it was straight out of her Good Housekeeping magazine way back in 1990. I scanned the recipe once and thought maybe I should make it ‘Amanda-Style’ – make it a little healthier and modernize the ingredients a bit – but then I had second thoughts. This was a classic to me and I loved it so much, so I stuck with the original recipe and I have no regrets. It’s amazing and who cares how odd and dated it is, I love it!

The first step is preparing the chicken. This was so simple – just combine flour and salt (of course I had to update the recipe a bit to use gluten free flour) and toss all the pieces of chicken in it until they’re coated. And yes, you use a whole chicken in this which I loved as a child. I was so used to just having chicken breasts in meals and thought it was extremely exciting to eat a chicken right off the leg or wing bones. Next, you brown the chicken in a pan with vegetable oil (or as the original recipe calls it, Salad Oil – I had to confirm with my mom that this in fact was vegetable oil haha). Then place all the pieces in a baking dish and coat them with the amazing peach sauce made of peach juice from the canned peaches (I was going to make this recipe with only fresh peaches because they’re in season right now, but you really do need the juice from the can to make this sauce, so I did half and half), honey, and ground ginger – yum!

As the chicken is baking in the oven, you’ll want to rotate the pieces every 10 to 15 minutes and coat with more sauce. When there are about 10 minutes left in the baking time, you add the peaches to the pan with the chicken, brush them with peach sauce, and then fill each of them with a dollop of sour cream – peaches and cream! – and pop them back in the oven to warm through for the last 10 minutes. While the chicken is amazing, the peaches and cream are my favorite part. Since I was making this on my own this time, I definitely made A LOT more peaches than the recipe called for because I can do what I want, and I ate them all! I would highly recommend you do the same too and I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do!