Would you believe me if I told you you only need five ingredients to make this? It’s true. The base of the dish is minute rice, which is kind of funny because this bakes for a good long time — but don’t worry, nothing turns to mush. You take that rice and you mix it with two cans of soup and one can’s worth of water. Any condensed soup will work but I like a combo of chicken and celery here. That mixture goes into a greased baking dish.
Then you’re going to top that rice mixture with some boneless skinless chicken breasts. Five medium breasts work well, but you can go up to six if they’re small, and use only four if they’re very large. So far, this has taken you, what? Five minutes?
There’s only one last thing to do and that’s to sprinkle a packet of dry onion soup mix over the chicken and cover the dish tightly with foil. Then it goes in the oven for an hour and a half, or until the rice has absorbed the liquid. That long cooking time makes it the perfect dinner to make when you have other stuff to worry about, and I don’t know about you, but I always have other stuff to worry about.
You might be thinking — Won’t that chicken turn out dry? Won’t that rice be overcooked? Won’t that dry onion soup mix be, well, dry? But the answer is no on all fronts.
The chicken comes out juicy, except for maybe the thinner end points and the rice is moist and saturated with flavor, but not soggy. And the onion soup mix? Well, that might be the best part. Since this has been closed up tightly in the oven the whole time, the juices that recirculated in the dish soften up that soup mix and keep it from being too crunchy. Instead, the onion flavor travels down into the rice and best of all, creates a topping that’s a burst of onion flavor.
