Mouth watering Poppy Seed Chicken

Posted by: Sarah on: July 13, 2010

• In: Life
• 11 Comments

My dear readers, you are in for a special treat. I’ve decided to share my all time favorite family recipe with you: Poppy Seed Chicken. {You know it’s a fabulous recipe when it’s featured in Southern Living.} My recipe varies slightly from SL so if you want the exact “mama’s way” recipe, you’ll need to follow theirs. Otherwise, I’ll give you mine.

What you need:

2-3 cups chicken, cut up

1 can cream of chicken {or cream of mushroom}

1 8 oz sour cream

1/2 roll Ritz crackers

2-3 tablespoons poppy seeds

Boil chicken until complete. I typically use boneless, skinless chicken breast, but finding cheap-ish free range chicken breast just isn’t easy. So, this go round I opted for a variation of bone-in breast and thighs that are free-range. If you do that, you’ll need to boil, then peel off the skin and de-bone.

Mix together chicken, cream soup, poppy seeds and sour cream:

Wanna know a secret? I use two cans of cream soup – one cream of chicken and one cream of mushroom. Why? Helps make the dish go further.

Wanna know an even crazier secret? This time I used plain yogurt instead of sour cream:

I had everything ready to go for making dinner, opened the refrigerator to grab the sour cream and…. we had no sour cream. Perfect. I went out on a limb and tossed in plain yogurt {since I have always heard you could substitute it for sour cream}. In the end, it had a slightly different taste, but if you had never had poppy seed chicken before, I doubt you’d notice the difference.

Put your mix in a cooking dish and spread with chopped up Ritz crackers and poppy seeds.

Here’s the end result:

Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes, or until golden and bubbly.

Our standard poppy seed dish is served with potatoes, veggies and bread. You can make the dish ahead of time {morning of or night before} and leave it in the fridge until you’re ready to cook it. It’s an easy dish that is a wonderfully yummy comfort food!

Tags: Good eats, Southern Living, Windham Familia