Quick & Easy Dinner Option: Pepper Jack Cheese and Salsa Baked Chicken

Tonight for dinner, I had thawed out chicken breasts to make but hadn't yet decided on how I was going to spruce them up. After roaming the fridge, I decided to make pepper jack and salsa baked chicken. I had tried this quick and easy recipe last year and loved it. You'll see throughout my dinner dish recipes, that we love chicken - so we incorporate it in many of our dinners. I'm constantly trying new things or looking for new ways to spruce up our chicken dishes. Hope you try this quick and easy recipe and enjoy it as much as we do!

Ingredients:

Chicken Breasts

Chunk Pepper Jack Cheese

Salsa

To start, spray your baking dish with cooking spray and place your clean chicken breasts on the pan. 

(What do I mean when I say 'clean chicken breasts'? I'm picky with meats - so when purchasing chicken or any other kinds of steaks, fish, etc. - I take the meat out of the package when I get home from the store, trim if necessary, rinse well, dry and re-package the meat in ziplock baggies to place in the freezer. That way - I know it's clean and when I pull it out of the freezer in the future, all I need to do is thaw, re-rinse and it's ready to go. Additionally, there's no need to worry about wasting time when trying to cook dinner, to trim or mess with any frozen or freezer-burnt packaging and meat.)

Next, you'll want to shred your pepper jack cheese. I used 1/4 of the chunk of cheese for two chicken breasts.

You can then sprinkle your desired amount of cheese evenly over your chicken breasts.

Next, you'll want to spoon salsa on top of your bed of shredded cheese. I recommend using salsa from a jar. If using fresh salsa, once you bake your dish - the salsa may become mushy and you'll lose the extra flavor. 

Note: Typically, I use a little more salsa to make the layer thick; however, we were running low on salsa - so this was the rest of the jar that we had on hand.

Once you've topped your chicken with the salsa, you're ready to bake! For thin chicken breasts, bake at 350 for 30 minutes. For more thick chicken breasts, bake at 350 for 40 minutes.

Here is a picture of what I had for dinner (along with steamed broccoli) - half of one of the chicken breasts I made! :) So delicious and not to mention, the kitchen smelled amazing!