What's For Dinner?

I've been absent from this blog for a long time, mainly because I'm busy. My younger child is in soccer five (!) days a week on average; I'm a member of a team which is working on a pilot for an original series; and I'm just busy. But, I have a good reason to jump back on the proverbial horse--recipes.

I've had a subscription to Bon Appetit for a long time, because I love food, and it's an excellent resource. Upon being diagnosed with celiac, I stopped looking at new issues when they arrived in the mail. I was just learning how to navigate a gluten-free lifestyle, and frankly, I thought looking at all of the things I couldn't eat would be terribly depressing.

A couple of weeks ago, as I was clearing out my magazine basket, I picked up four unopened issues and decided I should go through the recipes to see if I could modify them, just for fun. I've become more confident about cooking gluten-free over the last couple of months, and am more familiar with techniques to modify recipes to fit my dietary restrictions. It turns out that many of Bon Appetit's recipes are inherently gluten-free, and many others can be made appropriate with minor modifications. I spent hours poring over those four issues, enjoying dog-earing the pages of recipes I can't wait to sample, and then went back to older issues to find more fun things to make.

I am so excited, because as much as I love Amy's gluten free macaroni and cheese and my own tostadas, I'm bored to death with everything I've been eating lately. This discovery has gotten me excited about cooking again, and now it feels like somewhat of an adventure!

This evening we enjoyed Herbed Balsalmic Chicken with Bleu Cheese for dinner, and it was amazing. It had tons of flavor. This particular recipe is from a Bon Appetit article featuring 15 minute meals, and I find this particularly helpful on a soccer clinic day when I have extremely limited time to get a decent meal on the table. Below is the recipe with my modifications (which, in this case, didn't have anything to do with gluten--this recipe was inherently gluten free.)

*******
6 skinless boneless chicken breast halves (5-6 oz, each) or 2 pounds chicken tenderloin strips (which is what I used.)
1/2 cup balsalmic vinegar
3 tbsp. olive oil
1 tbsp. minced garlic
2 tsp. coarse kosher salt, divided
1 1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
2 tsp. herbes de Provence
1 3 to 4 oz. wedge of gluten free bleu cheese*, cut into slices

Place chicken in large resealable plastic bag. Whisk vinegar, 3 tbsp. oil, garlic, 1 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1 tsp. pepper in small bowl. Add to chicken; seal bag. Chill two hours, turning occasionally.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Brush broiling pan with olive oil and arrange chicken on pan. Sprinkle chicken with herbes de Provence, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1/2 tsp. pepper. Bake at 350 degrees until chicken is cooked through. Transfer to plates; top each piece of chicken with a slice of cheese.
*******

My modifications were the addition of the garlic, using chicken tenderloin instead of chicken breast because they cook more quickly, and the original recipe calls for the chicken to be grilled, but since we had snow in A-town today and it's freezing out there, I opted for an indoor method.

I served this dish with asparagus, which I baked alongside the chicken in a separate dish, tossed with olive oil, garlic powder, salt, and pepper, and topped off with 1 tbsp. of butter and squeeze of lemon juice prior to serving; as well as a bag of Birdseye Steamfresh brown rice. Easy, and delicious.

* There is much debate about the viability of bleu cheese as a gluten-free food. I personally seek out bleu cheeses which claim to be gluten free and verify this information via their ingredient listing. So far, I have not had any difficulty with bleu cheese as long as I am cautious about the ingredients, but please, use your best judgment and substitute something else for the bleu cheese if you feel at all uncomfortable about trying it. I think feta might be really interesting on this dish, and also think the chicken would be just fine on its own!