It’s not called Forgotten Chicken because you’ll forget about it. On the contrary, I believe that once you experience it, you will remember it for the rest of your life! It’s more that it’s so simple and hands-off that you can completely disregard it if necessary.It’s the kind of quick dish that comes in handy on weeknights when you don’t know what to prepare for dinner (or don’t have the energy to make it).

It’s an entire meal in a baking dish, with tasty rice and juicy chicken, and all you have to do is combine a few ingredients in a baking dish and bake it.Would you trust me if I told you there are only five ingredients required to produce this? That is correct. The dish’s base is minute rice, which is strange because it bakes for a long time — but don’t worry, nothing goes to mush. Take that rice and combine it with two cans of soup and one can of water.

Any condensed soup would do, but I prefer a chicken and celery combination here. This mixture is placed in a greased baking dish. The rice mixture will then be topped with boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Five medium breasts are sufficient, but you can increase to six if they are small, and just four if they are very enormous. What has this gotten you thus far? Only five minutes. There’s only one thing left to do: sprinkle a packet of dry onion soup mix over the chicken and carefully cover the dish with foil.

The dish is then baked for an hour and a half, or until the rice has absorbed all of the liquid. That extended cooking time makes it ideal for when you have other things to worry about, and I don’t know about you, but I always have other things to worry about.You might be wondering, “Won’t that chicken come out dry?” Isn’t that rice going to be overcooked? Isn’t that dry onion soup mix going to be, well, dry?

However, the answer is no on all counts.Except for the thinner end points, the chicken is juicy, and the rice is moist and flavorful but not soggy. What about the onion soup mix? That could be the finest part. Because this was tightly sealed in the oven the entire time, the juices that recirculated in the dish soften up the soup mix and keep it from becoming too crunchy. Instead, the onion flavor permeates the rice and, best of all, forms a topping that is bursting with onion flavor.