How to cook moist chicken breasts
The key to any successful meal starts with properly cooked meat. No one likes dry chicken and it isn't that difficult to produce a moist chicken breast with just a little attention. Start with a medium high heated pan to get a nice brown sear on both sides then lower the heat to low to finish cooking. Once the center of yhe sides is no longer visibly oink yuou are getting close. If you slice the chicken prematurely you'll lose all of the juices but an easy way to check for doneness is just to pierce it with a fork. If your fork goes through easily it is no longer rare in the center. Allow the chicken to rest for 5 minutes before serving to allow to finish cooking and to seal in the juices. Also by cooking on low heat you minimize the risknof over cooking and drying out your meat. So when you are cooking meats you can't eat raw, like chicken, start with high heat to get some color then turn it down to keep in those juices!
2 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 bunch asparagus
1 red bell pepper
1 cup chicken stock
4oz fusilli pasta
Salt
Pepper
Parmesan cheese
Heat a large skillet over medium high heat. Season the chicken with salt and pepper and brown on both sides for about 8 minutes per side.
Chop the asparagus and bell pepper into bite sized pieces and add to the skillet with the stock. Cook on low heat until the vegetables are tender, the chicken is cooked through and the broth is cooked down.
Meanwhile, cook the pasta in salted water until al dente.
Serve the chicken and vegetables over the pasta and top with shredded Parmesan cheese.
Dinner with the Clarks
A food blog dedicated to healthy, good food for two made on a budget.
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Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Friday, November 7, 2014
Goat Cheese, Spinach and Sun Dried Tomato Chicken Roulade
The weeknight dinner is often tough. It requires planning your meals ahead of time so that you have all of the groceries in house and getting home from work early enough and with enough energy to actually force yourself to cook. It is not always an easy feat to accomplish this and make something that actually looks like you put effort into it. This is where the chicken roulade comes in. Baked chicken breast sounds boring, but chicken stuffed with cheese and vegetables sounds much more interesting. The best part about this is you can take a weeknight where you have minimal groceries in the house, and throw together what you have to make an interesting dish. Consider broccoli and cream cheese, ham and brie, bacon and just about anything. You can turn a simple boring chicken breast into what looks like a complicated meal with interest with minimal effort.
Goat Cheese, Spinach, Sun Dried Tomato Chicken Roulade
Ingredients
3 chicken breasts
1 cup spinach, roughly torn
6 pieces sun dried tomato, sliced
2 tbs goat cheese
Salt
Pepper
Heat the oven to 450 ºF.
Lay the chicken breasts, one at a time, in between two sheets of wax paper. Beat until about 1/4” thick. Try not to tear the chicken while beating. Divide the spinach, sun dried tomatoes, and goat cheese among the chicken breasts and place on the wide side of the breast. Roll the chicken tightly over the filling towards you, tucking in the filling as you go. Place the rolled chicken breasts with the seam down on a broiler pan to keep them from unrolling. Season the chicken breasts with salt and pepper.
Bake for 25 minutes. Allow to rest for 5 minutes before slicing.
Why use a broiler pan?
The broiler pan is an underutilized kitchen utensil but now that people are more health conscience it really should be something that gets brought out regularly. By cooking meats on the broiler pan all of the fats just drain right out and away from the food. If you cook meats at a high temperature and allow them to rest there is absolutely no reason to be concerned with dry meats.
Goat Cheese, Spinach, Sun Dried Tomato Chicken Roulade
Ingredients
3 chicken breasts
1 cup spinach, roughly torn
6 pieces sun dried tomato, sliced
2 tbs goat cheese
Salt
Pepper
Heat the oven to 450 ºF.
Lay the chicken breasts, one at a time, in between two sheets of wax paper. Beat until about 1/4” thick. Try not to tear the chicken while beating. Divide the spinach, sun dried tomatoes, and goat cheese among the chicken breasts and place on the wide side of the breast. Roll the chicken tightly over the filling towards you, tucking in the filling as you go. Place the rolled chicken breasts with the seam down on a broiler pan to keep them from unrolling. Season the chicken breasts with salt and pepper.
Bake for 25 minutes. Allow to rest for 5 minutes before slicing.
Why use a broiler pan?
The broiler pan is an underutilized kitchen utensil but now that people are more health conscience it really should be something that gets brought out regularly. By cooking meats on the broiler pan all of the fats just drain right out and away from the food. If you cook meats at a high temperature and allow them to rest there is absolutely no reason to be concerned with dry meats.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Skillet Chicken and Asparagus
Every once in a while I will see a picture of a recipe that
looks good to me and I decide to make it but when I describe it to J I am not
able to sell it quite as well as the picture sold me. This was another one of those recipes. After I bought the groceries to make this and
I told him what we were having he was far from excited. Normally whenever I get home from work so
late that I can’t get dinner started before 6:30 I tend to give up and we go
out. Even though me starting dinner late and having it ready by 8:00 is no
different than us going to a restaurant and eating at 8:00, but for some reason
this makes sense in my head. The day that I was planning on making this I got
home really late, like after 7:00, which is very abnormal for me, but luckily (for
me, not my dog), Jason hadn't even left his office yet by the time I got home,
so I just started dinner anyway without any input from him. By the time he got home I was nearly finished
with dinner and he was much more interested in what I was cooking than when I
described it. This turned into one of
those dishes that will become a go-to. It was not the speediest dish but I
really enjoyed the flavors and I will definitely be going back to it, even though just looking at this you wouldn't think it would be loaded with flavor when the only seasonings are salt and pepper, but this was just very flavorful to me, I think the bacon really added a lot, don't skip the bacon.
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 lb asparagus
2 medium yellow squash
1 ½ cup chicken broth
2 tbs flour
4 pieces turkey bacon, chopped
1 tbs lemon juice
Olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
In a large skillet or dutch oven, heat one turn of olive oil
over medium high heat. Add the asparagus
and enough water just to cover the bottom of the skillet to steam the
asparagus. Cook for about 5 minutes,
until crisp tender, then remove from the skillet and set aside. Drain out any
water remaining in skillet. Add bacon and
cook until crisped, remove from skillet and set aside. Season the chicken with salt and pepper and
place in the skillet and cook for 10-15 mins, browning both sides but not
cooking through. Remove the chicken and
set aside. Add the squash to the skillet
and cook until tender, about 3 minutes. In
a small bowl whisk the chicken broth, lemon juice, and flour then add to the
skillet. Stir frequently and cook until
the gravy is thick and bubbly. Return
the chicken to the skillet and cook about another 15 minutes or until the
chicken is cooked through. 1 minute
before serving return the asparagus to the skillet to reheat it. Serve the chicken and vegetables topped with
bacon.
Serves 4, 240 calories, 6 g fat
For essentially being chicken with vegetables this was a
very flavorful dish. I tend to not like
recipes that require you to remove from the pan and set aside and cook
something new over and over again but this was definitely worth the effort, I
will be keeping this one.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Jamaican Jerk Chicken
J found this 52 week cooking challenge where every week they
give you a theme that you are supposed to cook one dish by. We initially were
excited about it and were going to do it but I got side tracked pretty quickly
and gave it up. This week I was struggling
to come up with my menu so we went back to that list to see what their
suggestion was for this week and it was Jamaican. We are both big fans of jerk chicken but for
some reason never make it, so we thought we’d try it. I have a Jamaican friend whose jerk chicken
is just awesome and she would probably cringe at our results but as white people
that do not eat a whole lot of Jamaican food we were both pretty pleased and
will most likely make this again.
1 cinnamon stick
1 tbs coriander seeds
1 tsp whole cloves
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tsp nutmeg
½ tsp ground allspice
1 bunch scallions, chopped
1 large onion, rough chopped
2-3 Scotch Bonnet peppers
1 tsp thyme
5 cloves garlic
½ cup white vinegar
1 cup soy sauce
½ cup sugar
10-12 boneless skinless chicken thighs
In a dry skillet over medium-high heat, toast the first 4
ingredients until aromatic. Grind the
spices then add the spices and the next 6 ingredients to a food processor and
puree. Combine the puree and the
vinegar, soy sauce and sugar in a large bowl.
Add the chicken to the bowl,
cover and refrigerate for 2 hours to overnight.
Heat a large skillet to high heat and sear both sides of all
of the chicken thighs. Once seared add
all of the chicken and the marinade to the skillet and cook on medium heat
until the chicken is cooked through.
Once the chicken is cooked remove it from the skillet and allow the
marinade to cook down, about 10 minutes, so that it can be served atop the
chicken.
This could not have been easier to make. I had J make the marinade one night while I
was cooking dinner for that night and we just put the chicken in the marinade
in the fridge overnight and the next night when I was ready to cook it I just
threw the chicken in the skillet and made my sides. I made Island Rice and black beans to go with
this and could not have been more pleased with my dinner.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Spicy Chicken Chili
We hosted a super bowl party this weekend and I of course
planned and fretted over my menu for a whole week. After scouring through super
bowl menus and pinterest pins for far more time than I am ok with admitting, I
decided on a few snacks and a couple entrees.
I took this as an opportunity to make a few things that I had been
craving but I also made some traditional super bowl foods. One of which was a chili. I wanted to try something different than my
standard ground turkey/bean chili recipe that is good and easy but really kind
of boring. I decided to go with a spicy
chicken chili and found a number of recipes that initially seemed interesting
but after further review decided to keep looking and found what is going to be
the only chili that I make from now. I adjusted the original recipe a little
bit to use some of the ingredients that I had on hand that needed to be used
and still can’t believe how good this turned out.
When I made this I didn't measure any of the spices so I
will put the recommended volumes but don’t hesitate, which you never should, to
taste and season to your liking because I can’t actually vouch for these
volumes but the general base I thought was really good.
1 large package of boneless chicken thighs ~ 3.5 lbs, sliced
into bite-sized chunks
1 tbs olive oil
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp chili powder
2 tbs ground cumin
1 tsp black pepper
½ tsp cinnamon
1 ½ tsp salt
½ tsp cayenne pepper
2 roasted red peppers, diced
1 green bell pepper, seeded and diced
2 jalapeno peppers, diced
1 can rotel
3 cups chicken broth
2 cans large butter beans
In a large pot heat the oil to medium high heat and add the
chicken, stirring often. Once the meet
is browned add the onion and garlic, cook for another 5 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients except for the
beans.
Reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer for about 30
minutes. Adjust the lid so the pot is
partially covered and continue simmering for about another 30 minutes to boil
off some of the excess liquid so the chili is more thick and less of a
stew. Add the beans and simmer for about
another 30 minutes.
Before the party J and I bet on which of the dishes were
going to be cleaned out by the end of the night and this was not one of the
ones I bet on but turned out to be the favorite and is definitely going to be
my go-to chili recipe from now on.
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