Bacon Wrapped, Cream Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts-Burt's Version:
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 block (12 oz?) cream cheese
1 bunch of 12 green onions, chopped up
1 tbsp. of onion powder
1 tbsp. of granulated garlic or garlic powder
1 tbsp. of sour cream
2 tbsp. of chives
2 strips of thick sliced bacon
Directions:
Pound out each chicken breast so they are about 1/4" thick or less than a 1/4" thick. Be careful not to make chicken pate. Not the point. You may need to trim the chicken pieces a bit so that they have a semi uniform shape that will be easy to roll.
Whip together using a electric hand mixer the cream cheese, green onions, onion powder, garlic powder, sour cream, and chives until it has taken in some air, is lighter in consistency, and is easily spreadable.
Taking great care to not contaminate the cream cheese spread with raw chicken, put a good size dollop of the mixture on one side of chicken breast and spread it so it evenly coats the one side. Then roll up each flattened piece up to look like a log or a pinwheel as best you can. You may need to use toothpicks to keep them rolled up. Which is fine because you will use the toothpicks with the bacon anyways.
You should have some of the cream cheese mixture left and it will be really good with crackers, so long as you don't poison yourself with salmonella by getting raw chicken juice into the rest of it.
Take each piece of bacon and wrap it around each chicken log in a way that makes the most sense to you. The bacon should be raw and if you use a good thick cut type of bacon, you can even stretch out each piece a little so that it will wrap easier.
Put in a baking dish and cook at 375 for 30 minutes, then turn your oven to broil and cook for another 5 minutes. There is no need to pull the pan out of the oven when you do this. The broiling will help make everything crispy and yummy.
Someone said on the internet that you can sub turkey bacon for the bacon, and a low fat cream cheese to make this healthier, but I think that is just cheating. One other note, there was quite a bit of liquid in the pan after the chicken was done cooking. As I look at this, those drippings probably could have made a really killer gravy if I'd thought of that at the time. Chicken, cream cheese, and bacon drippings. Yes, really killer gravy.
1 16oz package of frozen green beans
1 cast iron frying pan (my favorite cooking pan of all time)
Olive Oil, enough to coat the bottom of the pan
1 tbsp. butter
1 tbsp. margarine (yes use both if you have them)
Whatever seasoning you would like to use with the green beans. Lemon pepper would work great.
Put the pan over med high heat. When it is hot, put in the oil, butter, and margarine. Let them melt completely and wait until the butter starts to turn brownish. It should have a nutty smell to. Be careful here, because browning butter turns to burned butter quickly. Add the frozen green beans. Toss around so they get coated. (You can pretend you are a chef on Food Network.) Add your seasoning. Add a little more than you think you need. The beans and heat will absorb and mute the flavors. Cook, tossing and stirring continually, until the beans have thoroughly cooked through and even have little black strips on a few of them. That is flavor, not burned bits. A lot of black strips would be burned. Taste them as you cook. When they taste good to you stop cooking them.
And the really good spinach salad that Tanya made:
I just bought a bag of baby spinach leaves and dumped that into the bowl. I hulled and thinly sliced 10-12 strawberries and sprinkled them in, and chopped up a tomato too. Then we chopped up some honey roasted peanuts and sprinkled that over it. We have some Litehouse Huckleberry vinaigrette that we served with it and it was very tasty.
Some craisins, cut up grapes or any other berry would be great with it. Any fruity vinaigrette would go well with this salad.
