Garlic & Herb Balsamic Chicken

                                  

This quick, easy and delicious chicken is one of my favorite work night recipes. Perhaps someone out there is already making this exact chicken, but I threw this together one night after work with ingredients I had available and it has been on the menu ever since.

We always have organic chicken breasts or tenderloins in the fridge. I buy raw honey, extra virgin olive oil, bags of garlic, and balsamic vinegar of Modena in bulk so as to never run out. These are staples in my  kitchen. I can always mix up a vinaigrette with numerous variations. Oregano, basil, and rosemary  are three herbs I use quite a lot. I try to have fresh and dried versions on hand. I often use all of them together and sometimes I am more drawn to the scent of one over the other. They are all good. Definitely also staples in my pantry.

 Here are the ingredients for this recipe:

4-6 Organic chicken breasts, cut into tenderloins
Extra-virgin olive oil (organic if you have it)
Balsamic vinegar of Modena
Fresh cloves of garlic, sliced
Oregano, basil, rosemary, sea salt, pepper
Raw honey
Dijon Mustard

Instructions:

To prepare the chicken simply coat a large skillet or dutch oven with a generous amount of evoo, approx. 1/3 cup,  over medium heat on your stove. Add the cloves of garlic. I use plenty of garlic. It is a cancer fighter and we love it. The garlic becomes like candy to me after it is cooked in this recipe. Use as much or as little as you like. I personally have used anywhere from 8-10 large cloves of garlic so that you get bits of it with each and every piece of chicken. Just as soon as the garlic looks like it is starting to brown, which will take about 2 minutes, go ahead and put the chicken in the pan. Season it very  lightly with sea salt and pepper and then heavily with the herbs. Turn the pieces over and do the same to the other side. Increase the heat to medium-high and cook the chicken about 6 minutes on one side, then flip it and cook it about 6 minutes on the other side. Scoop the garlic up when you turn the chicken and spoon it over the chicken. Both sides should be crispy and browning. You should have a lot of browned bits stuck to the pan. Before the chicken starts to stick to the pan you need to deglaze the pan with the balsamic vinegar of Modena. Pour the vinegar into the pan, approx. 1/3 cup. Turn down the heat to medium, put a lid on the pan, and then shake the pan to coat the chicken well with the balsamic vinegar. Take off the lid, flip the chicken, and then cover the pan and shake it again to coat the other side. Remove the fully cooked chicken to a serving platter while you mix the warm balsamic vinaigrette in the pan. Reduce the heat to medium and add about 1/3cup of evoo to the pan, 1/3 cup of raw honey, 1/3 cup of dijon mustard and a couple of dashes of the balsamic vinegar. Stir well with a wooden spoon or whisk, picking up all of the browned bits, until it is slightly reduced and creamy, about 2 minutes. Spoon some over the chicken.

I like to serve the chicken on a bed of mixed organic greens. Usually I will add some walnuts and red onion. Sometimes I add some grated or crumbled grass-fed cheese. I pour the warm vinaigrette over the salad and refrigerate any leftover. My favorite sides to serve with this are my homemade oven-roasted and marinated beets, steamed lemon-butter asparagus or baked sweet potato.  

This meal takes about 30 minutes start to finish. It has become a family favorite because it is so tasty and versatile. I feel good when I serve this because it is healthy, and I don't have to wear myself out at the end of  a hard day. The house smells wonderful when it is cooking and everyone can't wait to join each other at the table by the time it is ready.

Southwest Style Shrimp Fiesta

After a long work week I enjoyed a day off today and the opportunity to cook something special for the family. I posted on facebook that I was cooking and even the girls, who no longer live at home, showed up for dinner tonight. It was great having all the kids home and the family eating together. A fun menu like the one I had planned sort of lures them in. For some reason when I decide to have a mexican dinner I go absolutely LOCO in the kitchen and we have a lot to eat. Maybe it goes back to my first memories of eating Mexican at Pancho's buffet in New Orleans. Eat, raise the flag, eat some more,. raise the flag,  haha! 

We started off with some homemade guacamole that I made with fresh ripe avocados, fresh squeezed organic lime juice, sea salt and one tomato, a serrano pepper and some cloves of garlic minced in my Ninja. I mashed it all with a potato masher and it was the best guacamole I have ever had. I am known for making good guacamole but I added a little extra love to this batch. Never had it this good in a restaurant, and definitely not any store bought variety either. It's easy. If you have never tried before I highly recommend it.( Avocados should definitely be on your delicious and healthy foods list since they contain high levels of monounsaturated fats, phytosterols and antioxidants like vitamin E, and vitamin C.)  Of course we had some chips with the guacamole. They were also homemade from non-gmo corn tortillas. If you can't find these where you shop you can order them online. I cut the tortillas into quarters and then deep fried them in grass-fed beef tallow. Grass fed beef tallow is one of the best sources of CLA, conjugated linoleic acid, known to help fight cancer. I use the tallow for the occasional frying I do, as well as for roux, sauces and gravies. Good stuff.

 For our side dish I could not resist making this dish that I had thrown together once before. I am calling it a Chile Rellenos Frittata. I am pretty sure it is my version of the classic chiles rellenos. It consists of oven roasted, peeled and seeded poblano peppers that I stuffed with a mixture of carmelized onion and garlic with a fresh all-natural  chihuahua cheese. Then I beat some eggs and cream together, pour it over the top, season, sprinkle with a little cheese and bake in the oven until it looks like the above photo.  I will be posting a step- by -step recipe for this soon because it is so, so good. Twice now it got totally wiped out.

Next I literally threw together this little southwest slaw. It is a bagged southwest slaw mix that I combined with a pepper jelly dressing I whipped up in my Ninja. I can't believe I thought of this. My homemade green pepper jelly, a little olive oil and a little organic sour cream. It was very similar to a regular slaw dressing, but with that pepper jelly kick, and of course no mayonnaise was involved. You can eat this all by itself but I made it to put on top of my entree. For the entree I had something very, very yummy planned.

David picked up these fresh caught Louisiana shrimp for me this afternoon. We sat at the kitchen table and peeled them together. For my southwest style shrimp I lined a large pan, coated it with olive oil, spread out the clean and peeled shrimp and then seasoned them with fresh minced garlic and serrano peppers, salt free fiesta lime seasoning, and a lot of fresh squeezed lime juice. I baked them at 400 degrees for a few minutes until they became the lovely pink shade you see in the photo. It was extremely difficult not to just eat these shrimp like popcorn. Somehow I managed to resist. It may have been the voices calling to me from the other room "Is it ready yet? When are we eating? I'm starving!" --Sound familiar? It doesn't even matter what time we eat. I guess just smelling the food makes them become impatient hungry people. As soon as the shrimp were ready I wrapped the foil around them to keep them warm and proceeded to start frying the corn tortillas in the already hot and waiting pot of beef tallow. I kept some flat for tostadas and I used tongs to bend others into taco shells. Then I combined guacamole, shrimp, the pepper jelly southwest slaw and cheese to make these absolutely delicious shrimp tacos and tostadas. Seriously one of the best southwest style meals I have ever had. The best part is that I have plenty of the components leftover and I am planning something delicious, quick and easy, yet slightly different for dinner after work tomorrow.

Sweet, Spicy, Fresh and Fruity Labor Day Menu

Yesterday I went grocery shopping with the intention of creating something completely different for our Labor Day dinner. I was drawn to the fruits and decided to pick up two pineapples, two mangoes, 4 plantains, limes and the very exotic looking starfruit. I have never eaten plantains or starfruit.I picked up other items that appealed to me and came home still not really knowing what I was going to cook. I spent a few minutes online looking at recipes for plantains and to find out how to eat a starfruit. I found a recipe for skillet fried plantains with cheese at "Laylita's recipes.com" She said in her home country they use a fresh farmer's cheese and since I had some fresh goat cheese in the fridge I decided to go for it. Happily I had chosen plantains ripened to the level that she recommended. Large black areas on the peel. I also found out that the starfruit is very simple to eat. Just wash them well, cut off the ends, gently slice off the brown tip on each ridge, and then slice into little stars...so cute! But I still wasn't sure if I was going to put them in a salad or what.

 It seemed that everyone was making barbequed chicken, and so my mouth started watering for some too. David and I did not want to light the grill because of the unbearable heat, and honestly I have been trying to avoid carcinogens. We very rarely cook on the grill anymore as one of our many efforts to fight David's cancer. He will hold out as long as he can and then he just can't help it. Usually when the weather is nice. So I opted for oven bbq which the kids and I love anyway. The first thing I did was cut up my whole organic chickens into pieces. Buying and cutting whole chickens is much more economical and lucky for me I learned how to do it when I was about 14 years old. There is probably a youtube video if you want to learn.
 

This is my favorite piece. I cut the wing with a big chunk of the breast attached.



I then lightly seasoned the chicken with sea salt and pepper and proceeded to making my own homemade sauce. The first thing I did was to cut and slice one of the pineapples. If you have never done this it is very easy. Again,  watch a youtube video...that is what I did the first time, ha ha. We eat one pineapple a week because it is delicious, aids in digestion, and it contains an enzyme called bromelain that among other things FIGHTS CANCER. Then I gently peeled the mangoes and removed all the flesh possible from the pit. Mangoes too have a long list of health benefits. Yes, they are a cancer fighting food. One of the important ways they fight cancer is by helping to ALKALIZE the body through the various acids contained in the fruit. If you have never eaten fresh aliced pineapple and mango you really must.
                                                                                           

 

I plugged in my big Ninja food processor and put in about half of this pineapple and all of the mango. After pureeing it measured exactly 4 cups. I scraped it into a saucepot on the stove and added a few things: I can of organic tomato paste, 2 tbl Mrs Dash Salt-Free Southwest Chipotle seasoning, 2 tsp allspice, 2 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp cumin, 1 tsp garlic powder, the juice of 2 limes, 1 cup of raw unfiltered local honey and 1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar. I kept the heat on medium-low because I just wanted to help the ingredients to marry together to create a nice sauce. When I asked David to taste it he said it was sweet at first and then the spice hit you as a bit of a surprise, not too spicy, and that is exactly what I wanted. -Sidenote: Since I really didn't know what I was going to make and I was seriously winging it I didn't have fresh peppers of any sort but if I had I would have roasted and pureed the peppers into the sauce rather than using a seasoning, but it was good.

So I lightly basted the chicken and put it into the preheated oven at 375 on a lined baking pan. After about 20-25 minutes I took it out and flipped the pieces over and basted the other side with sauce after I drained some of the pan juices off.  I then let it cook about another 20-25 minutes. I took it out again and flipped it this time so that the tops were facing up and gave it a really good final coating of the sauce. To my amazement I had made EXACTLY enough sauce. At this moment I was thinking I couldn't do that again if I tried. I let the chicken bake another 20-30 minutes until it looked done yet still juicy. This is the chicken:

 

David and the boys liked the chicken. I will be totally honest and tell you it was not as good as David's good old bbq on the grill. We have a special sauce we really love that we now know is not so very healthy for you. This Pineapple-Mango Sweet & Spicy Sauce is a good all natural and healthy substitution free of extra sugars, salt, preservatives and carcinogens. Especially if you are in the mood for something a little different.

 I will not be showing pictures of the plantains. They did not photograph well, but they were pretty tasty. We all thought that they tasted like potatoes. Later I went online and sure enough a lot of articles were commenting about their potato taste. If you let them get solid black before cooking them they will be sweeter...so I have read. While my chicken was cooking I was oven roasting some butternut squash and a large yam. I peeled, cubed, blanched and seasoned them, then put them into the oven on a lined baking sheet I had brushed with a little olive oil. I flipped them once and then took them out when they looked crispy and done.  I then threw together a salad of organic mixed greens, the squash and yam, with walnuts and a warm homemade maple-onion vinaigrette. (We will talk about my vinaigrettes in another post.)  We had the plantains for an appetizer and this was our dinner:

You may wonder what happened to the starfruit??..or maybe I have gone on so long that you forgot all about starfruit completely, ha ha. Well I could not find a place for them in my dinner. I wanted to showcase their uniqueness. After dinner it seemed that everyone got a "sweet tooth." I started thinking about what I could make for dessert with the starfruit, which tastes like green apple or pear, and ingredients I had in the house... a light bulb went off!  I had organic whole grain flour, my homemade pear butter, banana, honey, cinnamon, organic butter, coconut sugar, and farmhouse eggs so I quickly threw together this yummy Starfruit Upside-Down Spice Cake. It was so cute...and delicious warm from the oven.

I really had fun experimenting with some new ingredients. When I look at what I made I do feel that perhaps my choices were slightly more a fall menu than one for Labor Day. I will chalk it up to the fact that YES, I do long for fall to be here. I am ready for warm comfort foods, scents of pumpkin spice, and COOL WEATHER.