Super Easy Sweet and Sour Sauce for Chicken

This is a great recipe, one I've used often.  I've never met anyone who didn't like it and have given it out dozens of times.  I originally got the recipe from a women I worked with years ago.  There's only three ingredients:

Super Easy Sweet and Sour Sauce for Chicken

1 small bottle Russian salad dressing
1 pkg dry Lipton Onion Soup Mix
10 oz. apricot preserves

Mix together and pour over skinned chicken pieces (makes enough for 1 large chicken, cut up).  Bake at 350 for one hour. 

As far as I've been able to find in my supermarket, WishBone is the only company that makes Russian Dressing.  Because I know you read labels, you will notice that after the ingredient maltodextrin it has corn, wheat in parentheses.  I wondered about that, so I looked it up on the internet.  The source is Gluten Free Living Magazine's website glutenfreeliving.com if you want to check it out.  They publish information about many ingredients and here's what they say about maltodextrin:

"Maltodextrin is gluten free.  It can be made from a variety of starches, including corn, potato, rice or wheat.  However the source does not matter because maltodextrin is such a highly processed ingredient that the protein is removed, rendering it gluten free.  If wheat is used to make maltodextrin, "wheat" will appear on the label.  Even in this case, the maltodextrin would be gluten free."

Also, even though there is no wheat listed in the ingredients of the Lipton Onion Soup Mix, after the ingredients it says, "Made in a facility that processes milk, egg, soy, wheat, sesame and sulfites."

I wondered about that too, so I went to several sources, and couldn't find any conclusive evidence about the danger of contamination from the facility.  Celiac.com did talk about the soup mix, though, and said that in their opinion it was gluten free and fine to use.  So...you'll have to decide for yourself whether to use it or not.  Celiac.com did offer some recipes for homemade onion soup mixes for those concerned about other ingredients in the Lipton mix that they were allergic to.

When I make this, I skin the chicken (except for the wings) and remove as much of the fat as I can before putting it in the pan, which I've sprayed with Pam to make clean-up easier.  Then I just pour the sauce over it, spooning the excess onto the chicken pieces before popping it into the oven.

After baking for an hour, it looks like this:

The sauce in the pan can be used over rice -- it's delicious.  If you've removed the skin and as much fat as you can find from the chicken pieces, there shouldn't be too much fat floating on top of the sweet and sour sauce.  Just remove the chicken pieces to a serving plate, pour off any excess fat that may be floating on top of the sauce, and then use a spatula to scrape all the yummy sauce into a gravy boat. 

It's spring -- fresh asparagus time!  Do you know this trick for keeping your asparagus nice and crisp for much longer in your refrigerator? 

Just find a container not too much bigger than the bunch you have, put about 1" of water in the bottom and put the asparagus in before placing in your refrigerator.  Easy!