Chicken with Sweet Jalapeno Sauce

When we say jalapeno in this house, we like to pronounce the J, just for fun.  "Jalapinno" is a phonetic rendering of our pronunciation.  Last year I made this fabulous chicken bacon tart, which had jalapeno jelly in it, so when I saw this recipe, I wanted to make it, because then I could buy the jelly again to make the other chicken thing, which we are having next week.  And that recipe wasn't too spicy, so I was hoping this one wouldn't be either.  For this meal, we also had my mother and my niece joining us.  My niece is probably the hands-down toughest food critic I have ever faced.  Picky doesn't begin to describe...But this dish was already on the meal plan before I knew she would be here.  It's from Simple & Delicious, and we had it with the carrot recipe that was beside it in the magazine, which I will post separately.

Chicken with Sweet Jalapeno Sauce
4 boneless skinless chicken breast halves
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 tbsp canola oil
1 small onion, thinly sliced (but not TOO thinly because your mom doesn't like onions and needs to be able to pick them out...)
1 celery rib, thinly sliced
1/2 cup chicken broth
3 tbsp orange juice
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1/2 cup jalapeno pepper jelly (in the barbecue sauce aisle at the Walmart)
2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp minced fresh parsley (which I left out)

Flatten chicken to 1/4" thickness; sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Cook chicken in batches in oil in a large skillet over medium heat for 2-3 minutes on each side or until meat is no longer pink.  Remove and keep warm.  Saute onion and celery in the same pan until crisp tender.  Add the chicken broth, orange juice, and thyme.  Bring to a boil; cook until liquid is reduced by half.  Stir in pepper jelly until melted.  Remove from heat; stir in butter and parsley.  Serve chicken with sauce.

Yum.  So this was a bit spicy, but also so so tasty.  It was more of a heat you could feel than like a tingly spicy.  My niece, and my two younger children, had plain chicken without the sauce (my niece even had seconds of chicken!  Woot!).  But the rest of us that had the sauce with it really really liked it.  We will definitely have this again, it was so good!