Sometimes you have to go out of your comfort zone.
Sometimes you have to bake pies from scratch or lasagna with seafood ingredients or attempt to make your own version of restaurant-style mozzarella sticks that will most likely melt all over your oven.
Sometimes you have to just bite the proverbial bullet and try to make a recipe that you aren’t sure about.
Which brings me to my latest Pinterest find. Well, technically it was a Facebook Tasty find. But Pinterest had a similar recipe and I combined the two in order to make it count for this column.
And technically I didn’t find it. TheFather did and posted it to Facebook to tempt me with how delicious it looked.
But I digress.
In the Tasty video, the recipe became Fajita Stuffed Chicken, with veggies and cheese oozing out of perfectly cooked chicken breasts.
In reality, well …
The thing is, I have never made stuffed chicken before. And I have a long history of messing up when frying things on the stove (ask my BoyBFF sometime about the horrible night I almost killed him with my attempt at empanadas). So there were two strikes against me with this recipe before I even tried to make it.
But I am not a quitter. And a challenge accepted (thanks a lot Father) is a challenge that must be – at the very least – attempted.
So I got together the ingredients to make Fajita Stuffed Chicken and forged ahead right on out of my comfort zone.
For my take on this recipe I changed up just a couple of ingredients (to keep it lower cal/lower carb/lower whatever for those around my dinner table that are paying closer attention to what they eat than I normally do). Instead of cream cheese I used neufchatel, instead of regular cheddar cheese I used a low fat Mexican blend. Luckily this wasn’t a meal heavy on the carbs etc so there wasn’t a lot of substituting needed.
Making the cheesy veggie filling was pretty easy. I grilled up the peppers and onions and then added them in a bowl with all of the cheese to mix them up in a gooey concoction that was absolutely delicious on crackers (yep I tried it BUT not til after I had managed to squish as much filling as possible into the chicken breasts).
So making the filling (and eating the extra) was easy. Filling the chicken breasts … not so much. First of all, the chicken TheFather had purchased was enormous. You might think that would make it easier to stuff it, but nope. I tried the best I could to cut the chicken just through the middle, and deep enough to make room for the filling but not so deep that the chicken would fall apart. Yet I still ended up with cheese and veggies spilling out all over the place.
But I persevered. I put those oozing chicken breasts into a frying pan on the stove and cooked them up for about five minutes per side. Because of the size of the chicken I could only make two at a time and, as I had six to make, I decided to put the ‘finished’ ones in the oven at about 300 degrees to keep them warm. AND to finish cooking them, as five minutes wasn’t nearly enough time, it turned out.
In the end it took frying on the stove as well as baking in the oven to get the chicken breasts cooked up. I burnt one, overcooked two more, and ended up with three that I thought looked pretty good. All of them lost some of the cheesy filling, making me wish I had left some of the extra to use as topping (instead of scarfing it all down while waiting for the chicken to cook).
For the most part my Fajita Stuffed Chicken was ok. Edible and not terrible looking (at least the unburnt parts), everyone who ate it seemed to like it. But it took three times as long to cook as I thought it was going to, it wasn’t as flavorful as I would have hoped, and I kind of made a mess out of stuffing the chicken. So I’m going to call this a draw instead of an outright win or loss.
I guess the important thing is that I stepped outside my comfort zone and tried this recipe in the first place.
AND that I know if I make this recipe again, I can do it way better.
I may still eat all the access cheese filling though. Don’t judge me, it was delicious.
SOURCE – Fajita Stuffed Chicken recipe
