Friday again and another great recipe! Today we welcome Ashley from Spunky Suds with a recipe that will work for company or for a weeknight dinner. Oh, and make sure to check out her soaps – they rock!!
I was searching for a recipe for Chicken Cordon Bleu and much to my disappointment, I found that most recipes called for ingredients such as stove top stuffing and cream of chicken soup. I don’t know about you, but I’m not too keen on feeding my family meals that are full of MSG and ingredients that I can’t even pronounce, (I like to use this rule of thumb—if I can’t pronounce it, I shouldn’t use it—and that goes for food and also for skin care).
I know that I can’t micromanage everything in my life, but there are parts that I can certainly avoid. After much searching, I was finally able to find a recipe that sounded good and used real food for ingredients! I made a few adjustments to mine, and we are happy to add this to one of our special family recipes!
Place chicken breasts between sheets of plastic wrap. Using a mallet, pound each chicken breast to 1/4″ thickness. Honestly, this was so much fun!
Place 1 cheese slice and 1 ham slice on each breast. I bought a huge block of swiss cheese slices at Costco–and we love cheese–so I actually did 3 pieces per chicken breast.
Roll up each breast and using a toothpick, secure the ends, then coat each in roll of chicken in flour & shake off any excess. In a large skillet, add a few tablespoons of butter and turn your heat to med/high. When the butter is melted and hot, carefully place your chicken rolls in the skillet and brown both sides of the chicken.
Once they are a nice golden color, add chicken to crock pot but make sure you remember to remove the toothpicks!
Now for the sauce:
In a saucepan over medium/high heat, melt butter and add the salt, pepper, onions and the sugar and whisk to combine. Add the flour, and whisk quickly until bubbly and smooth. Add the broth, cream & milk and keep on whisking over med. heat until it has thickened. Add grated cheese (or cheese slices) and stir until melted and sauce is smooth and creamy.
Pour the sauce over chicken and cover. Cook on low for 5-6 hours or on high for 3-4 hours.
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Crock Pot Chicken Cordon Bleu
- 4-6 Boneless, skinless Chicken Breasts
- 4 to 6 slices Swiss or Provolone cheese
- 4 to 6 thin slices smoked ham
- 1/4 to 1/2 cup all-purpose flour to coat the chicken
Sauce
- 1 Cup milk
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 1 cup chicken broth
- 1 1/2 cups Cheddar, Swiss or Colby cheese-grated (I used swiss slices)
- 1/2 cup of grated Parmesan cheese (opt)
- 2-4 tablespoons butter
- 2 heaping tablespoons flour
- 1 tsp. sauteed onions or minced onions
- 1/2 tsp. pepper
- 1 tsp. salt
- 2 teaspoons white granulated sugar
Instructions:
- Place chicken breasts between sheets of plastic wrap. Using a mallet, pound each chicken breast to 1/4″ thickness.
- Place 1 cheese slice and 1 ham slice on each breast. Roll up each breast and using a toothpick, secure the ends, then coat each in roll of chicken in flour & shake off any excess.
- In a large skillet, add a few tablespoons of butter and turn your heat to med/high.
- When the butter is melted and hot, carefully place your chicken rolls in the skillet and brown both sides of the chicken.
- Once they are a nice golden color, add chicken to crock pot. Make sure you remember to remove the toothpicks!
Sauce:
- In a saucepan over medium/high heat, melt butter and add the salt, pepper, onions and the sugar and whisk to combine.
- Add the flour, and whisk quickly until bubbly and smooth.
- Add the broth, cream & milk and keep on whisking over med. heat until it has thickened.
- Add grated cheese (or cheese slices) and stir until melted and sauce is smooth and creamy.
- Pour the sauce over chicken and cover.
- Cook on low for 5-6 hours or on high for 3-4 hours.
Ashley Haynes lives in the Inland Northwest, is a stay at home wife and homeschooling mother of 5. She and her husband enjoy small scale farming with cows, chickens, and more. Ashley loves to bake and provide nutritional meals for her family. She likes being active and enjoys hobbies such as milking her cows, running, and 4-wheeling, just to name a few. God is first in her life and she strives to please Him in all she does.
In 2009 Ashley started researching soap-making. It was 2010 before she became brave enough to try her first batch of soap. Not wanting to spend a bunch of money to get set up with all the right the equipment, (in case it turned out to be something she didn’t enjoy) her first batch of soap was made in a sheetrock mud pan, was not blended correctly and not a great color. But regardless, she fell in love with the process and Spunky Suds was born! Ashley is passionate about providing natural, healthy and fun soaps for everyone!
I’m trying this right now. I just put it in the crock pot. I tried to stay as close to the recipe as possible. I don’t have a mallet, so I didn’t get a good pounding. I also didn’t have toothpicks or anything close to it. So they were a bit floppy in the pan. It works though. I didn’t have heavy cream, so I skipped it and the milk, and used 2 cups of half and half instead. I had to use havarti because I didn’t have swiss. I left out the sugar because I try to limit it. The sauce tasted so yummy! I haven’t made this in years because I don’t do canned soups. I’ll update later after we have eaten. Also, I haved pinned this and I’ll try it again someday with the propper ingredients.
Hope it turned out well for you, Rena! Thanks for the comment.
— Julie, HH Team
HI Stacey and Ashley,
This looks delicious. I can’t wait to try it. Just a small.suggestion to increase the nutritional value without compromising taste, possibly substituting the heavy cream and sugar with a high protein Greek yogurt with honey. All the best.
Susan
That sounds like a yummy sub!
I love chicken cordon bleu but the addition of the sauce adds way too much fat for me. I usually marinade my chicken in a spicy Italian dressing overnight(I know that adds fat too but not as much as heavy cream) then put Rosemary ham and Swiss or provolone cheese in the middle before rolling it. Then I dredge it in panko bread crumbs with added Italian seasoning. Bake at 350° until the temp is 160° on a meat thermometer. It always tastes fantasic.
Thanks for your recipe, Kathy!
I have this cooking in my slow cooker right now and can’t wait for dinner! Thanks for the delicious, healthy recipe!
Hope you love it!
So, I decided to get the thin-sliced chicken breasts and thought I’d be lazy and not flatten them even more. Mistake! Even if you get the thin breasts, it’s still probably a good idea to flatten them even more. It’s a little difficult to roll them, still.
I realized my mistake but only had 4 breasts and so I continued my method. I also forgot to add the broth with the cream and milk, but added it (after removing the chicken rolls) to the crockpot and whisked it up..looks just fine!
I’ll be sure to update when my husband and I devour this dish that smells incredible, already. My husband really isn’t huge on ham, but I think the sauce and cheese will turn this into a new dish that we have regularly. I placed a whole slice of swiss between the chicken and ham, and then another half a slice on top of the ham before rolling. I’m really excited about the outcome. 🙂
Also, your chicken adobo recipe is incredible! I’m just horrible at cooking regular rice. I had to run to the store to grab some instant white rice because I tried it two separate times and it still didn’t come out. =/ Substituted apple vinegar for the white, too, and it turned out just as eyebrow-curling!
Try this method out. 🙂
http://www.stacymakescents.com/how-to-boil-rice
Took me almost an hour to find a recipe free from condensed soup! Thank you!
Enjoy!
This was pretty awesome!!
I wans’t going to look at this because I, too, thought it would be full of packaged ingredients (mushroom soup,stuffing, etc). I’m glad I checked!! I will definitely try this!
See, that’s the good thing about this website and Fridays. 🙂 Since our family changed to a whole foods diet last March, I don’t post recipes with packaged ingredients. If a guest poster happens to include one, I always make sure to include a link to a homemade version….so, you can always look here for good recipes without worrying about prepackaged foods. 🙂
Hi Thanks for the recipe and all the great tips you often put on, I am from the Uk and have found in most cases not all if you search for american recipes you do tend to get alot of them suggesting adding a pack of some kind of soup mix or yellow cake mix etc like you say, however i have found that a lot of english recipes dont tend to do that we dont really cook that way much,it may be worth searching some uk ones for ideas, although they do weigh everything instead of the lovely cup measures that you americans give, Thanks again i look forward to your latest emails xx
🙂 That’s when my kitchen scale comes in handy!
My husband loves chicken cordon bleu! But I have never found a recipe without cream of whatever soups. Thank you so much!! 🙂 This is terrific!
Yay for husband! 🙂
Yum, these sound really good! I love chicken cordon bleu!
I just like that blue is spelled bleu. 🙂
This recipe sounds good, but I wonder why do it in the crockpot? Once all the prep work, browning, and sauce-making are done, it would likely only take 20 minutes more to bake in the oven. If the issue is not having the time for prep before dinner time, then the dish could be assembled in the morning, put in the fridge, and baked later. The other possibility is to avoid heating the house by running the oven–a real advantage in Sacramento where the summer temps often exceed 100 degrees. Still, on hot days, I go for main dish salads like chef, nicoise, antipasto, taco.
Nancy, I get asked this question a lot and it’s a good one. 🙂 In this recipe the chicken is only browned in the skillet and it finishes cooking in the oven. Around here, we don’t like to turn on the oven in the summer heat, so the crock pot is a great tool!
The slow cooking in the crock pot makes the chicken soooo tender that the oven just can’t beat it.
Also, I do know that lots of people like to use their crock pot while they’re in their camper and they might have a cooktop but not an oven. 🙂