15 June 2009

broiled chicken with pesto

#25 of 50 - the halfway point! I got this out of a book called "Quick and Easy" - it was easy, but not very quick. The cooking time took half an hour instead of 15 minutes. Adam really liked it and said it's a repeat, which kind of surprised me. He's usually much more indifferent when he says something is fine.

chicken thighs with bone and skin
olive oil
1 can diced tomatoes, strained (I put it in the pasta strainer and let a bunch of the juice drain off)
green pesto sauce (you can buy this in little jars in the Italian section at the grocery store)
French bread
parmesan cheese
pine nuts or almonds

1. Put the chicken thighs in a dish that can go in the broiler, and brush the skin with a thin layer of olive oil. Cook them for 15-20 minutes, turning over occasionally, until the skin starts to turn golden. Make sure the chicken is cooked all the way, especially around the bone. I had to cook our's for 30 or 40 minutes before the red was all the way out of the meat from the bone.

Note: You could remove the skin from the chicken if you want, but it did keep the whole thing very moist. I cooked it with the skin on the chicken, but we didn't eat it. If you get chicken thighs with no bone, your cooking time will go down, so adjust accordingly.

2. Towards the end of the chicken cooking, heat in a saucepan the strained tomatoes mixed with some of the pesto. Use a balance that you like for that - I didn't measure it.

3. When the chicken is cooked through, remove from the oven and drain the excess fat out of the dish. Then put the tomato/pesto mix over the chicken, and put back in the broiler for a few more minutes until it's all heated through.

4. While the chicken is cooking, cut the French bread into slices, and spread the pesto on the slices. Sprinkle with parm cheese and the pine nuts (we skipped the nuts because we had neither) and toast in the broiler at the same time as the chicken until it's golden and crispy.

5. Serve the chicken and bread with salad greens. Adam made little sandwiches with his bread and chicken, but I ate it with a fork. It was good - I liked the pesto on the bread.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Just random. I had this cook book in college. My good friend Liana and I joked around and called it, "cheap and easy" as in, "you are ..." It became a running gag for 4 years of undergraduate work.

good times