Sweet and Sour (Catalina) Chicken

This DEFINITELY goes on the must-cook-again list! I am so pleased with myself with this one. A friend of mine had told me about cooking chicken with Catalina dressing. She's right, if you Google "catalina crock pot chicken" (or something similar) you get a million variations of this idea. Of course, when I went to the grocery store yesterday, I didn't bring any of the recipes with me - but I took a chance and decided to wing it! And boy am I glad I did!

Here are the ingredients:

• 1 lb of Chicken Tenders (8 tenders)
• 1 medium onion
• 1 medium red pepper
• 1 can pineapple chunks in pineapple sauce (not syrup - only cuz we're really trying to eat healthier)
• 1/2 bottle of Fat Free Catalina dressing

Yes, it's really as simple as...

• I poured a small amount of the pineapple juice in the bottom of my 4 qt crock pot so that the chicken wouldn't stick.
• Dumped all the chicken in.
• Cut up the onion and red pepper into chunks and put those on next. (I really wanted the flavor of the onion and red pepper, but I don't actually eat them so much. The bigger chunks made it easier to pick out. :-)
• Put all the pineapple on top (without the juice).
• Poured about 1/4 cup more of the pineapple juice over everything but not the whole amount from the can.
• Squeezed 1/2 the bottle of Catalina dressing over top of everything.

• Cook on high for 4 hours (I could have probably cooked this on low for longer, but my friend just posted on Facebook today that she thought she had food poisoning from a pork slow cooker recipe, and I really just wanted to make sure the chicken was fully cooked.)
• Turn it down to low for 30-45 more minutes or until the chicken starts to fall apart (which it did).
• Optional: If you want to thicken up the sauce a little bit (I'm a sauce junkie), in a small bowl mix 1 tsp of corn starch with 1/4 cup of water and mix well. Turn the crock pot back up to high, pour this mixture in and stir. Let that come back up to a little boil. Voila! (You can make it even thicker with more corn starch, but be sure to dilute it in water before adding to your pot to avoid clumps.)

I steamed up some rice to serve this on and voila! OMG! First of all, about 2 hours in it started to smell SOOO good! I really was hoping it was going to taste as good as it smelled. Totally company-worthy! And I love that it was a healthier version of one of our favorite dishes, mostly because normally sweet and sour chicken is fried chicken then cooked with sauce. 

The chicken was so tender and yummy. Oh, but the chicken gets a little dark looking from the sauce, so it looked like dark meat until you cut into it. (This is only important for people like my husband to know, as he does not like dark meat.) Plenty for leftovers for us to eat another meal - I'll probably have my portion for lunch tomorrow.

I'm really so pleased with how this turned out. I'm a little hungry after going down to the gym, and it's taking every ounce of will power I have not to finish the whole thing off! :-)