Chicken and Veggies

Since I like to cook, as has already been established, I've decided that I'm going to broaden my post topics to that of food as well.  I really enjoyed sharing my experience of baking my cake for Thanksgiving and I gotta figure that someone out there will probably appreciate similar posts.  Also, I recently watched Julie & Julia.  Fantastic movie, if you haven't seen it, you should.  Anyway, moving on, I recently got a Pinterest account, one of those things that I'd heard about for ages and actively avoided because it was so popular.  Well, I caved and I have discovered a whole new fantastic world.  Not even kidding, I love it.  One of my friends has been griping at me because I've been pinning so much and blowing up her Pinterest board.  Whoops!

Probably the most exciting thing I've found for me is all the recipes.  There are so many!  I'm trying not to collect too many so I don't overwhelm myself with all the possibilities.  Since I had yesterday off of work because I was up until 4 am watching the midnight premiere of The Desolation of Smaug, more on that in my next post, I decided to cook dinner.  And since I was cooking dinner, I figured it would be fun to try one of the recipes I'd found on Pinterest.  And so was born the idea that whenever I tried a new recipe, I could blog about it and let other people know if it was really good or bad or if I'd done something differently, etc.  So if you like to cook, I hope this is helpful and fun and if you don't like to cook then maybe it'll inspire you to bust out the pots and pans and make something yummy.

For last night I wanted to make to make something relatively simple.  I was tired all day despite sleeping until about 1 pm and really didn't have the energy or attention span to do anything too complex.  As I was contemplating what to do, I remembered this recipe that I had found on Pinterest  that sounded simple, but good.  Here's the link to the recipe and feel free to peruse the other recipes and stuff I have:  Chicken and Veggies.

The recipe says to use 4-6 chicken breast, I used 6 since I wanted there to be some leftovers.  I used frozen green beans which seemed to work just fine and 5 red potatoes that I cut into bite-size pieces.  If you look at the picture, the potato pieces are much bigger but I figured they would cook faster this way and would be easier to eat.  I did not use a packet of Italian dressing mix either.  I used a lite Italian dressing instead.  I can't give you an exact measurement, but I basically drizzled on enough so that there was an even layer on top.  I didn't worry about mixing everything up because I knew that the dressing would end up at the bottom of the pan.  I also didn't use a full stick of butter since I wasn't using a mix.  I did use about half a stick just to add some moisture.  I also sprinkled on some Parmesan cheese just for fun.  So pretty quick and easy.  But since I was tired I spaced and forgot to put foil on top.  So when I checked on everything after about 45 minutes, the chicken was not cooked.  So, time to improvise!

With the chicken, I went ahead and got it out and cooked it on the stovetop while I put some foil on the dish and put it back in the oven.  I cooked the chicken until they were lightly browned on both sides, about five minutes.  Once the chicken was done, I got out the potatoes and finished cooking them on the stovetop as well.  With the potatoes, to try to add some extra flavor, I sprinkled on some more Parmesan cheese and also spooned in some of the dressing/butter mix at the bottom of the pan and stirred the potatoes around in that.  Like the chicken they were still pretty raw so I cooked them for about fifteen minutes on the stove and when they were still a bit raw, I finally just put them in the microwave and used the potato setting for a bit to finish cooking.  The green beans were fully cooked so I just put them in a serving dish and set them out.

So despite that minor set back and delaying dinner for a bit, everything tasted really good overall.  The chicken had a really nice flavor to it that was subtle and not at all overpowering.  The potatoes were the same with a very nice flavor that I think cooking them on the stove helped bring out.  Neither one tasted strongly of Italian dressing.  The green beans cooked very nicely, but they had a much stronger Italian dressing flavor to them that was almost overpowering.  They still tasted good, it just would have been nice if the flavor wasn't quite so strong.  Overall I think it was a success.  My parents and I all really enjoyed it.  Next time I just need to remember to put the foil on and see how it does the way it was supposed to be cooked!