Happy 2010! Sure enough, I kick off the new year (after my pontificating about my fear of chicken) by royally screwing up a relatively simple chicken dish.
I had one of those grocery shopping trips where I bought a lot of stuff preemptively. What if I need corn starch? Better grab it. Pretty sure I’m going to need Fillo dough eventually. Toss it in the basket. After that sort of insane trip to the local grocery store, I decided I wanted to cook something new and easy.
I slightly modified a recipe from the cookbook I got over winter break. The original calls for taco seasoning and pepper jack cheese. Well, I don’t really care for tacos and I didn’t have any pepper jack on hand. What I did have was something my boyfriend and I found called Buffalo Wing Cheese. I used chili powder instead of taco seasoning. The picture looks better than it tasted.
Spicy Chicken Roll Up
1 boneless skinless chicken breast
1 oz (approximately) of spicy cheese
1 Tbsp. chili powder (or whatever seasoning you think would sound good)
1 Tbsp. veggie oil.
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Pound the chicken breast until it’s about ¼” thick. Slice the cheese, and line it up in the middle of the chicken breast. Fold the breast around the cheese and secure with a toothpick. Rub the outside with seasoning.
Heat up the oil in a skillet. Brown the chicken on all sides, and then toss into a greased baking dish. Bake for 25-30 minutes.
It sounds so great, right? It seems relatively easy and doesn’t seem to take much time. Well. It probably is. Leave it to me to mess something like that up.
Right off the bat I had an issue. I do not have toothpicks. I wracked my brain for some kind of replacement, and the only thing that came to mind was (man I can’t believe I’m confessing this) bobby pins. Yes. The ones for your hair.
I did use new ones for the sake of hygiene, but it was still pretty bizarre. They only sort of worked, and most of the cheese melted out.
The bigger issue was cook time. My chicken looked cooked all the way through, but it had that certain quality that made me think, “Hm, could use more time in the oven.”
Genius here tried to microwave it instead.
All in all a total loss. With toothpicks and longer cooking time, it would have been quite good I’m certain. My first shot, however, was a loss. Luckily I have plenty of hummus in my house, so I did not go hungry.
