Chicken with Mango Barbeque Sauce

This is my first week cooking along with the gang at Craving Ellie in My Belly. I've been reading all of the CEiMB blogs for quite awhile now and every week the food looks so great that I finally had to join in. Honestly, this is a group that I never thought I'd join because Ellie just sort of bugs me when I see her on the Food Network. However, whether or not I like her show is irrelevant at this point because her recipes look great and I have the CEiMB group to thank for that! So, I happily joined in to make the Chicken with Mango Barbeque Sauce this week.

I followed the recipe exactly to the letter except that I didn't broil the chicken. My oven is old, and although it works out, I'd be really nervous to broil in it. The oven is missing key things, such as the arrow that actually points to the temperature of the oven. It's just dots between 300-400 degrees so I just sort of guess where 350 or 375 is and it works out. I was also raised in Houston where we can grill 365 days a year and in my family I'm guessing that we must use the grill at least 300 days of the year. I don't have a grill but my mom did get me this awesome Breville indoor grill/panini thing for Christmas and I love it. Dudley, being a good and proper Texas caveman cowboy, is completely baffled by the notion of gilling things indoors but I say, when it's freezing cold outside and you don't have a grill anyway, party on.

So, the first thing to do was make the sauce because it's needed to marinate the chicken. I was a little nervous about the mango in the sauce but my favorite barbeque sauce ever has pinapple juice in it so I thought that this mango might be ok. Remember, I'm entering this recipe with a little bit of BBQ sauce baggage because a) I'm from Texas and b) I love BBQ sauce (as opposed to the people who really and truly believe that sauce should have no part of barbeque). So, that said, I liked this sauce, it was yummy and it did great things for the chicken, but it's NOT barbeque sauce. No way, no how.

I used the stick blender to make the sauce. It's not the most appetizing thing to look at but the mango and jalapenos give it a sweet-spicy kick that I like.

Here are the chicken breasts, awaiting a final douse of the very-good-but-not-barbeque sauce.

And, the verdict? Delicious. Even Dudley liked it and he doesn't like fruit in anything savory (of course it helps that I didn't tell him what it was) and he doesn't like chicken. I loved it and I would definitely eat it again. I served it with green chile cornbread and coleslaw. I'm not sure if these were the best choices for sides but I was lacking ideas and it seemed to work.


Thanks to Aggie, of Aggie's Kitchen, for hosting this week's CEiMB. Check out her blog because I just looked at it and it's fantastic.