Coconut Chicken with Orange Marmalade Sauce

Chicken is such an easy and fairly cheap protein.  It makes for a great, quick weeknight meal but can be so boring at times. 

I was happy to find this recipe on a blog that I love reading, Good Thymes and Good Food.  I love that her recipes are always easy and I usually have the ingredients on hand.  I also love that she's expecting her second child around the same time that I'm due so I know that her recipes aren't too labor intensive and she likely plans her meals and preps her food while doing a million other 'Mom things' during the day/evening. 

This recipe was really good.  I don't love coconut but will eat it if its baked (desserts or used in a breading such as this). The one thing that really bummed me out was how soggy the bottom of the chicken got while baking.  I don't know if it was because I used milk instead of egg for my egg coating.  We were out of eggs and I figured milk would be a fine substitute. 

I also did not have the apricot preserves that it called for and only had orange marmalade available.  It worked, but I would definitely try this recipe again using apricot preserves to see if it's better or different. 

Coconut Chicken with Orange Marmalade Sauce
Recipe from: Good Thymes and Good Food 

Ingredients
1 egg
1 cup sweetened flaked coconut
1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup apricot preserves (or an apricot blend such as peach-apricot)
2 tblsp dijon mustard

Preheat oven to 400 and line a baking sheet with foil.

In a medium, shallow dish, lightly beat the egg.  In another medium, shallow dish stir together the coconut, flour, garlic powder, salt and pepper.

Taking one piece of chicken at a time, dip into the egg and then into the coconut mixture. Pat the coconut mixture onto the chicken to make sure that it sticks. Place dipped chicken breast onto the baking sheet.  Continue with the remaining pieces of chicken.

Drizzle the melted butter over the chicken pieces.  Bake in your preheated oven 30-40 minutes until chicken is cooked through. If the chicken does not brown, place under the broil for a couple of minutes but be sure to watch it carefully!  I did not put mine under the broiler and you can see that some bits of coconut got a little dark!

For the sauce mixture, combine the preserves and the dijon mustard. Serve the sauce at room temperature.