I have to take a few minutes to blog about the Brown-Eyed Guy. I met him in September of last year, and was pleasantly surprised to find out he has a daughter who is supposed to be gluten free, so he wasn't "freaky" about the whole gluten-free thing like the ex-husband always was. He likes learning new recipes, so it's been fun trying out new things, either cooking with him, or cooking for him. It's fun to cook at his place, since he has a fantastic gas stove, and now that his oven is fixed, it's broadened the horizons for cooking opportunities. Not that baking chicken in a toaster oven wasn't successful, you can just bake MORE chicken in the big oven. I have had fun introducing him to new things in the kitchen, including two chicken experiments.
As I mentioned in my last post, my challenge to myself has been to use up the vast array of condiments that had accumulated in my pantry. I had a jar of sundried tomato pesto that, prior to going gluten free, would've been spread on toasted french bread and eaten just like that. Figuring it might work with chicken, a google search turned up this recipe. Brown-Eyed Guy was game to try it out, so we planned on having it for dinner one evening when I was visiting. I decided to mix the filling in my kitchen ahead of time, primarily because I didn't know how he'd react to the idea of goat cheese (he'd never had it), and primarily so I could keep the amount of "stuff" getting transported to a minimum. So, I mixed the sundried tomato pesto with some fresh Herb de Provence goat cheese from Caly Road Creamery, and got HEAVEN. Oh my freaking gosh...this filling was the bomb. I texted Brown-Eyed Guy that it was a good thing I'd doubled the recipe, because I ended up eating half of it with a spoon before it ever made it to the fridge.
Fast forward to dinner: I was out on a volleyball court doing what I do, so Brown-Eyed Guy got to do the prep work and pound the chicken breasts flat before I got there. He watched me put everything together and then we popped it in the toaster oven to cook. I wish I had thought to take a picture, because this chicken was incredible, and looked fantastic. It also gave Brown-Eyed Guy some ideas of his own for a variation on this idea that he wanted to try. We'll get to that momentarily.
So...I know the burning question on your mind is what happened to the rest of that sundried tomato pesto? I discovered that the filling for the chicken breasts was also quite amazing when spread on gluten free pizza crust, topped with grated parm and baked in the oven.
As for Brown-Eyed Guy's variation on the original stuffed chicken dish....he decided this would be really good if we stuffed the chicken with ham, cheese, and bacon. The original idea was chicken cordon bleu, but somehow we went off on our own path, and as we were putting filling inside, Brown-Eyed Guy decided he wanted some jalapenos in his. He was going to bread it with corn flakes, but we discovered his corn flakes weren't gluten free, so we decided to coat the chicken with the parmesan cheese leftover from the original chicken experiment. This was also the first time we used the big oven, so we got to cook all four breasts at once. The finished product was tasty, but we also discovered a couple of things that would've made it better. First one was we needed something "fat" in the filling. The swiss cheese didn't provide enough moisture, so some butter or cream cheese inside the chicken would've helped. The other thing we goofed up on was we used a broiler pan with a grate. This allowed all the juice to drain away from the chicken, which wasn't exactly conducive to keeping the chicken moist. Lessons learned, the chicken was still tasty, and no, there are no pictures of this one either.
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