Flavorful Chicken Recipes With Fruit

Fruit is good for you and combining it with a lean, nutritious meat like chicken means that you can make some really flavorful recipes while enjoying your fresh Farmer's Market produce. Fruit juices have been used for many years in marinade recipes, making it a great accompaniment for meat or chicken. The combination of juicy, sweet fruits with succulent chicken is a real winner. A lot of healthy chicken recipes with fruit can be cooked on the grill, because the smoky grill adds yet more flavor to the tender meat.

If you are using fruit to marinate chicken, pay attention to the marinating time. A tough steak might need to be marinated overnight to break down the tough fibers but chicken is only marinated to flavor it, rather than to tenderize it. Leaving chicken marinating for too long might make it go mushy.

Adding Fruit to Chicken Curries

Chicken curries are great for experimenting with, if you want to try adding fruit to your chicken recipe. Throw in a chopped apple or banana, a drained can of chopped peach or even a handful of sultanas. You can add fruit to sweet curries with coconut milk or cream, or to hot, spicy and sharp-flavored ones. The fruit will enhance the sweetness of a sweet curry or give a nice contrast in a hot one.

You can choose when to add the fruit, depending on how soft you want it. If you add a sliced banana to a curry five minutes before serving it, the slices will be warm but intact. Adding the banana at the beginning of the cooking time means the banana will gradually dissolve and give the curry a sweet flavor. It also works as a thickener if you do that.

Recipe for Boneless Chicken in a Raspberry Glaze

This delicious recipe combines an easy three ingredient sauce with chicken breast and raspberries. You might prefer to switch the raspberries and raspberry jam for strawberry and strawberry jam, or peaches and peach jam. You will need to use fresh fruit in this recipe, for the best results.

The combination of mustard with jam gives this boneless chicken a wonderfully spicy, sweet finish. This recipe serves six people and it is nice with French fries, boiled or mashed potatoes, or rice.

What you will need:

6 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 1/2 cups fresh raspberries
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 cup raspberry jam
Salt and pepper, to taste

How to make it:

Brush the grill rack with vegetable oil. Combine the mustard, honey, jam, salt and pepper. Put the chicken on the grill and cook it covered for about eight minutes on each side, brushing it often with the raspberry jam mixture, or until it is cooked through and no pink remains in the thickest part of the breast. Discard any leftover jam mixture and serve the chicken topped with the fresh raspberries.