“Harvest Snaps provided me with compensation & product in exchange for a this Chicken and Broccoli Au Gratin recipe and post. However, all the opinions are 100% mine”

Being in the kitchen is always something that I look forward to. Even when I’m tired, I know that no matter what’s gone on during the day or what’s going to happen during the evening, I can find a little bit of peace and quiet when I’m in the kitchen working on dinner or testing recipes for the blog.  Stirring, seasoning and tasting are just ways for me to relax, just like watching TV is a way for my husband to relax after a long day at work.  Now would I want to stand in the kitchen and work on recipes for hours after work? No! However, an hour or so of me time behind the stove is just what I need some nights to unwind.

But with that being said, I still have to admit that I do love a good dinner that doesn’t keep me in the kitchen all night long. Just because I can relax a bit while I’m cooking dinner doesn’t mean that I want to stand in there for 2 or 3 hours making dinner.  Nope, an hour is about my max during the week for cooking dinner, I’ll save the more labor intense meals for the weekend.

So when I sat down to work on some recipe ideas for Harvest Snaps I wanted to come up with something that was tasty, something that incorporated their flavorful little snacks but also something that I could toss together after spending  hour and hours at the office all day.

Enter the Chicken and Broccoli Au Gratin! It combines my love of chicken, broccoli and cheese into one easy to make dinner.

So let’s chat about this Au Gratin for a second. Before this, I had really only made Au Gratin Potatoes, I really just thought that that was it. That was until I got ahold of a new cooking magazine a few months ago and learned that really anything can be made into a gratin!

So what’s a gratin? It’s pretty much any kind of ingredient that has been topped with a  browned crust. A lot of gratins use cheese, butter and breadcrumbs but I changed mine up just a bit.

For my topping I used shredded cheese and crushed Harvest Snaps CAESAR Snapea Crisps! Originally on the first test run of the recipe I used the Harvest Snaps Tomato Basil  Snapea Crisp and while it was good it wasn’t exactly what I was going after taste wise. Then the other Monday when I had to go to the ER, we ended up at the store to pick up my medicine and I saw these Caesar flavored  Snapea Crisps, as soon as I saw them I knew that these were the ones that I needed for my Chicken and Broccoli Au Gratin!

I seasoned a bit of chicken, diced it up and then cooked it in a medium skillet with a splash of olive oil until it was completely cooked.  While the chicken was cooking I went ahead and steamed up a few heads of broccoli for the dish and then I started working on the cream sauce.

A little bit of butter and flour whisked into a sauce pan with a few pinches of salt, pepper, garlic powder and dry mustard made the perfect cream sauce for this Chicken and Broccoli Au Gratin.

Then I poured the chicken and broccoli into a 2 quart baking dish, sprinkled on some cheese and drizzle that homemade cream sauce all over the top. Next comes the  Harvest Snaps CAESAR Snapea Crisps! Now the Harvest Snaps CAESAR Snapea Crisps come whole like the photo above but I just put them into a plastic baggies, sealed up the top and smashed them with the back of a wooden spoon to get them perfectly crushed for the top.

So after the cream sauce was poured on, I sprinkled even more cheese on top and then I  covered the top of the Chicken and Broccoli Au Gratin with the crushed Harvest Snaps CAESAR Snapea Crisps!

After that I just popped the entire dish into the oven at 450F for about 20 minutes until it was golden brown and hot.

My friend Nicole said that she loves buying  Harvest Snaps to snack on, but had never thought to actually cook with them! I can’t wait to send her this recipe, she’s going to love it.

Ready to starting cooking with more Harvest Snaps recipes? Visit www.harvestsnaps.com/snapsacrossamerica to grab more delicious ideas and recipes!

Chicken and Broccoli Au Gratin