From “Don’t Panic, Supper’s In The Freezer”, Martinez, et.al.:

48 oz Catalina dressing

6 pkgs of dry onion soup mix

6, 1lb cans of whole berry cranberry sauce

24 chicken breasts

Mix everything but the chicken in a big bowl.  Place the chicken breasts into freezer bags, allotting per meal.  Evenly spoon the cranberry mixture into your bags.  Get the air out, freeze flat.  It’s good in the freezer for up to 10 months.  So…basically forever.

Serving day: thaw completely.  Put it all in a greased baking dish and bake uncovered at 350 for 1.5 hours.  I’d like to say it takes less time, but it really doesn’t.  Especially if you use the large pre-frozen breasts (Which you don’t need to thaw until baking day.  I throw the mix into the bags with frozen chicken and it turns out the same on thaw and bake day as if I had used fresh breasts).

I serve this meal on a bit of linguine with a vegetable.  I’ve learned to never put oil in the water for pasta.  Salt and boil in a heap of water.  Never rinse.  I didn’t know these things!  Alice Water’s ‘The Art of Simple Food” is quickly become my favorite book.

Tonight I made breaded and fried zucchini, which the girls call zucchini chips.  They’ll eat as many as I give them.  Even kids know that anything fried tastes better than anything unfried.  They call cranberry chicken “pink chicken”, which they also like.  I say “like” because there isn’t a protein on earth they “love”.  The meal does turn out hot pink when it’s cooked….kind of different, but very tasty!