Simple Orange Chicken

My husband and I like to get Chinese takeout but its a 20 minute drive one way and its expensive.  We can never agree on the same food so we always spend $30 plus dollars between meat dishes, fried rice and chow mien of course.  My husband LOVES shrimp fried rice and could honestly do without everything else.  I personally have to have some kind of breaded chicken and sweet gooey sauce.  I stick with orange chicken unless we are at a buffet and I can see everything first.  I like to try different things when I am not paying $7-$12 a dish for something I don't like.  So since we are trying to save money for m husbands layoff coming up in the next month and not knowing when the last day will be we are trying to stop eating out at our favorite places and trying to mimic the dishes at home.  


  I like to make 1 dish meals as often as possible and always looking for a way to use my oven verses the stovetop.  So in this dish I just took 3 enormous semi thawed chicken breast and chopped them up into decent sizes and tossed into a baking dish with black pepper, steak seasoning (I use on everything), cayenne pepper and red pepper flakes.  I put it in the oven at 375 degrees until it was cooked juicy looking.

 I added diced frozen bell peppers and frozen broccoli and put it back in the oven until it was no longer frozen but the broccoli was still firm.  Pour off the juice in the baking dish so the sweet mixture your are about to pour over it doesn't get too watery.











 I mixed 3/4 to 1 cup of orange marmalade jelly and equal parts BBQ sauce of your liking and mix together well until it thins out some and pour over the chicken mixture and put back in the over and turn the heat up to 400 degrees.  After about 10 minutes stir mixture all up and let it cook for about another 15 minutes.  I don't have the patients to wait for it to cook down and thicken so I take it out and serve. 

My 8 year old son refuses to eat Chinese food when we order out but he ate this like it was his favorite dish.  We trick him into eating new things because I don't want him going to college only eating chicken nuggets and French fries.  You have no idea how picky my 8 year old is with food.  He will go to bed hungry before he eats something that has any spice or ONIONS in it, even if we tell him its not onions its celery or something else that kind of looks like an onion he refuses it.  He is stubborn like his parents.  He can't help it really.