We eat a lot of chicken at our house. Some times we get bored with it so I try and make up different versions of chicken dishes to enjoy that don’t take a lot of work on my part. I didn’t avoid the kitchen in our house for the first sixteen years of our marriage for no reason. Before I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I rarely cooked except during the holidays and on weekends when I occasionally made pancakes from a mix.
Recently, I was in a rush to throw dinner together and all I knew going in was that skinless chicken breasts were involved. After a quick survey of the fridge, I pulled out the BBQ sauce, spicy brown mustard and white American cheese. Had we had sliced cheddar I would have used that, but as always, I use what we have on hand. I mixed up two thirds BBQ sauce to one part mustard and brushed it on both sides of the chicken. Those went into a baking dish that was sprayed with canola oil. When the chicken was almost done, about 20 minutes later in a 375 degree oven, I topped the breasts with cheese and returned to the oven until it bubbled. My husband concluded that this dish should be added to our rotation of chicken recipes and I agreed. It was super simple to make and delicious to eat.
One of our favorite chicken dishes was from a now closed Virginia Highlands restaurant called Capo’s. Recipe Zaar has the Chicken Diablo recipe posted, which I was thrilled to find out when Capo’s was no more. However, this recipe is fairly time consuming so more often than not, we save it for special events. It’s a very wonderful recipe and really impresses dinner guests. Another similar dish, albeit with different ingredients and flavors is much easier to make and tastes excellent as well. For lack of a more creative name, it’s simply called “Bleu Cheese Chicken”.
One day when I really wanted to do something different with my plain old chicken breasts, I created a stuffing mixture with crumbled bleu cheese, softened cream cheese and fresh chopped spinach that turned out surprisingly tasty. Ingredient amounts vary based on how many chicken breasts you have to stuff and how much cheese you want in them. My mixture was about 1/3 bleu cheese, 1/3 cream cheese and 1/3 finely chopped fresh spinach. After pounding out the chicken breasts quite flat, I put a scoop of the filling in the middle of each one and wrapped the chicken around cheese and used toothpicks to hold them closed.
Depending on how much time you have for prep work, you can flour the wrapped chicken or not. Plain rice flour works fine and a flour blend works great as well. Whether you use flour or not, sauté the chicken in a little olive oil on each side until brown before placing them in a 375 degree oven. This dish usually takes about 20-25 minutes to cook thoroughly. Though most bleu cheese seems to be gluten-free, not all makers of it will state whether theirs is or not. Therefore, I like using brands that will declare their bleu cheese is gluten-free. Many bleu cheeses are gluten-free these days, but it’s tough to kill outdated info in cyberspace.
When I feel like I just can’t come up with another chicken recipe on my own, I look to the zillion chicken recipes on Recipe Zaar. Most of them will be able to be modified to be gluten-free, without losing anything in terms of taste or texture. There really is something to be said for eating lots of chicken instead of overdoing it with red meat. Since heart disease runs in my family, we eat plenty of fish, chicken and turkey and that diet really seems to agree with us both.
Great post, Tiffany! That really is how easy it is to come up with naturally gluten-free recipes! Wonderful job and post. 🙂
Shirley
Thanks Shirley! Thanks for stopping by. There is definitely something to be said for eating real food made with real ingredients. I’m a lazy cook and always look for shortcuts in the kitchen so I love finding easy recipes that are either naturally gluten-free or easily converted to be so.