(Originally posted August 1, 2012 @ mtable.wordpress.com)
Who doesn’t enjoy a good chicken dinner? “Good,” of course, being the qualifying word. Chicken is great! It’s cheap and easy to cook. The problem is, at least for me, it gets boring fast. I grew up eating a lot of chicken. I mean, a lot of chicken. It was, and probably still is, one of my mother’s favorite things to cook. That being said, I went though a period of time where I was sick of chicken.
I’m no longer sick of chicken, but I still look for ways to keep it new and interesting. Stuffed chicken breasts are a great way to do that. Sure you can buy them pre-made in the freezer section, but they’re expensive and loaded with… well, all that bad stuff that goes into frozen food. Thus, I decided to try out this pinned recipe:
Difficulty Rating: 5 (1 = Opening a Twinkie, 10 = Rack of Lamb)
I gathered my ingredients. One of the items on the list is “lots of toothpicks.” “Lots of toothpicks” is not pictured below because I neglected to pick up toothpicks and had to run back out shortly after snapping this picture.
That red powder in the tupperware is my Cajun seasoning.
Basically, you shred the cheese, mix it with the spinach, beat some chicken flat (I’m resisting the urge to make a “beat your meat” joke. Oops, too late!), roll it up and season. Oh, and don’t forget to use your “lots of toothpicks” to keep it all together. For the Cajun seasoning, I used Cooking Creation’s own recipe here. Instead of Italian breadcrumbs, I used panko partly because I like the texture better and partly because it’s what I had in the house.
Here’s what it looks like pre-oven:
Mmmm, raw chicken breast.
Forty-ish minutes later, I had the final product:
Left: Mine – Right: Cooking Creation’s
Left: Mine – Right: Cooking Creation’s
Maybe mine didn’t look as pretty, but it was tasty! I’m always worried about drying out chicken breasts, but these were tender and moist. The Cajun seasoning gave it a nice kick. Just the right amount of heat and flavor, though I’d probably add more salt next time. Unfortunetely, the filling was a bit of a mess. The recipe tells you to cook the breasts seam down, but even though I toothpicked the crap out of that chicken, most of the cheese leaked out. You can see in the picture above that about 90% of my cheese wound up on the pan. You still get the overall flavor of the pepper jack and there are remnants in the spinach which gives it a nice creamy consistency, but I was really looking for an explosion of molten cheesy awesomeness. Next time, I might try cooking it seam up. Here was our dinner…
See that biscuit? That’s my next blog, so stay tuned!
Final Rating: 7.5 (1 = Never Again! – 10 = Yummm!)
I’d make this recipe again. My husband and I both enjoyed it.
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