My Menu Needs a Fresh Take: Jalapeño Popper Chicken Recipe - Motherhood on the Rocks (2024)

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When we had grilled cheese and soup the other night for the fourth time in as many weeks, I knew it was time to rethink our long-term dinner menu. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind grilled cheese and tomato soup, it’s just that I prefer a little more variety in my meals.

The only problem is “variety” and “simplicity” usually don’t go hand in hand, but a recent discovery changed that. While on the hunt for ways to breathe new life into our chicken dishes, I discovered Kraft Fresh Take, a cheese and breadcrumb mix that adds a unique blend of flavor to just about any meal. Oh, and it’s also easy to use.

The mix includes a pouch of cheese and a pouch of seasoned breading that are combined when you’re ready to start cooking and can be used to coat chicken, pork, fish and all sorts of other things. It can be found in the cheese section of your local grocery store (I found mine at Walmart) and is available in nine varieties: Italian Parmesan, Classic Four Cheese, Spicy Chipotle Cheddar, Smokey Mesquite BBQ, Southwest Three Cheese, Rosemary and Roasted Garlic, Cheddar Jack and Bacon, Chili Lime and Panko, and Savory Four Cheese.

I chose Cheddar Jack and Bacon to play the starring role in a dish that was brand new to our family menu: Jalapeño Popper Chicken. The dish is essentially chicken breasts stuffed with a mixture of cream cheese, cheddar cheese and diced jalapeño peppers, and coated in Cheddar Jack and Bacon Kraft Fresh Take. (See recipe at the bottom of this entry.)

Don’t underestimate Walmart’s selection of fresh veggies. That’s where I got the jalapeños used in this dish. You can see my whole shopping experience here.

By the way, the seeds are the only spicy part of jalapeños. Use as many or as few seeds as you’d like, depending on how spicy you prefer it. For my little one, I didn’t include any seeds in her portion of the mixture to keep it mild, but added a bunch to mine and the hubby’s.

Simply mix the cream cheese, shredded cheddar and diced jalapeños.

Butterfly the chicken and stuff it with the mixture. Or if you really want, you can do all that pounding and rolling, but why make it harder than you need to. Just put some toothpicks in to keep the cheese mixture from spilling out.

Then pat the chicken breasts all over with a coating of the Kraft Fresh Take. These will be baked in the oven, but here’s a trick I recently started using for baking breaded meats: Bake them on a metal wire rack which fits on top of your baking sheet. This keeps the bottoms from getting soggy, but it also makes cleaning up your baking sheet a lot easier!

After about 20 minutes in the oven (or a little longer depending upon the size of your chicken breasts), your meal is ready! I served our Jalapeño Popper Chicken with a side of broccoli, which was the perfect vegetable for mopping up the gooey cheesy filling that might spill out of your chicken!

If you want to learn more about Kraft Fresh Takes, check out their website. You can also watch for the Kraft Fresh Possibilities Tour truck which will be making stops across the country from March through the end of July. To see if they are making a stop in your town you can check out the Fresh Possibilities Tour website.

Check out my other easy dinner recipes while you’re here.

I am a member of the Collective Bias® Social Fabric® Community. This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias® and Kraft Foods. All opinions are my own. #FreshTake #cbias #SocialFabric”