Chicken Pillows

I am always happy to discover easy and kid-friendly recipes for my girls, and I was not let down by the Chicken Rolls recipe I found on the blog Melt My Butter, the other day. I was excited to find this blog by Janna, who is a pediatrician and mom of two brilliant and adorable little boys (who never fail to entertain. I've been reading her other blog, Keeping Up with the Jennings for months now, and her kids are quite the little characters).

Melt My Butter is a blog about family-friendly freezer cooking recipes, so that dinner can be made in double or triple batches and then frozen for convenience. Wow, sounds good to me! I was writing my weekly shopping list when she posted her Chicken Rolls recipe, so I decided to try that one first.

Ingredients:
2 cooked chicken breasts, diced or shredded
8 oz cream cheese, softened (reduced fat is the best)
2 cans Pillsbury crescent rolls (also try to get the reduced fat ones)
salt to taste
(optional: 1 cup chopped broccoli florets)

A way to make this recipe even easier, is to grill chicken ahead of time and freeze it. Chicken can be frozen twice - once while raw, and once after cooking. Making a bunch of grilled chicken ahead of time and pulling it out of the freezer when its needed cuts a ton of time from meal prep.

I have chicken cooking issues, in that I have this bizarre compulsion to chop my chicken into little bite sized pieces while its being cooked - I'm paranoid that it is still raw inside and that everyone I know and love with die of raw chicken disease (or something like that). Luckily most of the recipes I make call for chicken pieces, but if any of you come over for grilled chicken, just know you wont have to cut it yourself!

In a medium sized mixing bowl, mix chicken with cream cheese. I added broccoli because my kids love it and I'm always happy to find recipes that I can add more veggies to.

Plus, with all of the chicken and cream cheese, the broccoli taste is pretty masked. Even non-broccoli lovers will probably enjoy it with broccoli in it!

I had a hard time getting the rolls filled, as Annelie wanted me to spoon feed her all of the mixture. She loved it!

Roll out crescent rolls. Separate rolls into rectangles made up of 2 rolls. Each can yields 4 rectangles.

Put 1/8 of mixture in center of each rectangle. Fold over and press edges closed. Pinch closed any gaps in the perforated line between rolls of each rectangle.

Gracie decided they looked like "Chicken Pillows" so she renamed them and then invented the Yummy Yummy Chicken Pillow chant (in which she shouted out "Yummy yummy chicken pillows" over and over until I kicked her out of the kitchen and sent her to her room to play) which is now the chicken roll anthem in our house.

Place on baking sheet with a few inches of space around each one and bake as directed on can of rolls. My oven runs a little hot, so the time on the can was perfect, but with some stoves, give a couple of extra minutes, as the filling inside might need longer to cook.

And voila! They are done. They were quick, they were easy, and they were an absolute hit.

And the best part? They were so low mess that Annelie didn't have to eat her dinner in her diaper, like she usually does. With the exception of rubbing some of if in her hair, she was able to pick up her chicken pillow and eat it easily, without making a big mess. YAY!

I'll be keeping my eyes on Melt My Butter, eager for more kid friendly, easy recipes to try. Next on my list: Chicken Cordon Bleu Lasagna. Yum!

Enjoy!
xoxo,