Earlier in the day, I had tried a recipe from my new recipe book, The Sexy Forever Recipe Bible. Several weeks ago, I saw the book's author, Suzanne Somers, on some daytime talk show making an amazing dish (which is now one of our faves, I'll put the recipe up as soon as I make it again and snap a photo). I've been planning to pick up the book since then. She cooks with full fat, low carb, fresh ingredients and fits pretty perfectly with the diet I'm doing right now. Also, that one dish was so absolutlely out of this world, that I figured the book was worth a try. It's already heavily annotated and sticky noted by me. So, in the morning, I tried her partner, Alan's Fried Eggs in Onion Nests. Super yum! Captain Handsome watched me eat them, and although he has an aversion to eggs, I could see he was envious of my tasty onion nests. That got my creative juices percolating.
When we started getting close to dinner time, I decided on a springy dinner, BBQ sauce chicken in onion nests (it would look like little eggs in a nest!), served with fresh green beans (grass!). Captain Handsome didn't notice the beautiful springscape on his plate, but, as you'll see in the review below, the appearance of the meal didn't really matter!
Oven-Baked BBQ Chicken (a really-complicated Shauna original)
Ingredients:
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/2 c reduced sodium chicken broth
3 tbsp President's Choice Stampede BBQ sauce Beer and Chipotle flavour (or your favourite BBQ sauce)
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Process:
-preheat oven to 350 degrees
-trim fat and nasty bloody spots off of chicken, keeping a wide berth, because that's just gross
-discard icky bits of chicken
-slice chicken breasts into small strips of about 1/2 inch thick and 1-2 inches long
-put Worcestershire sauce and chicken broth in bottom of casserole dish large enough to hold all the chicken without overlapping
-grind fresh salt and pepper onto both sides of each piece of chicken and place into dish
-once oven is preheated, place chicken into oven
-cook for 10 minutes, flip chicken pieces, cook for another 10 minutes
-chicken should be fully cooked by now
-BBQ sauce time!
-remove dish from oven and use half the BBQ sauce on one side of the chicken, brush it on to all pieces evenly (I don't have a pastry brush or anything, I just used a fork)
-turn up the broiler (about 500 degrees), cook chicken for about 5 minutes, peeking in, you just want the BBQ sauce to get a little crispy at the edges
-repeat with other side
-remove from oven
-makes 4 servings
Nutritional Information:
(per serving)
Calories: 125
Carbs: 7
Fat: 2
Protein: 14
Fibre: 0
Sugar: 6
This dinner is slightly tricky, as you need to be keeping an eye on both the chicken AND the onions at the same time, perhaps in opposite ends of your kitchen. But, if I can do it, so can you!
Onion Nests (Alan's Onion Nests from Sexy Forever Recipe Bible)
Ingredients:
1 large Vidalia onion
1 tbsp evoo (extra virgin olive oil)
1/2 tbsp butter
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Process:
-peel the skin off the onion and slice as thin as possible with a very sharp knife (this is what I did, but tj and Suzanne Somers both recommend a mandolin, this would be much more time efficient)
-in a large skillet, heat the evoo and butter over med-high heat
-when the fats are hot, add the onion
-let them cook until they are crispy and almost burned (this took me about 13 minutes)
-scrape the onions up with a spatula and place one quarter of them in piles on each plate, create the nest shape by using a fork to push out the centre of each pile of onions and build up the sides
-makes 4 servings
Nutritional Information:
(per serving)
Calories: 58
Carbs: 4
Fat: 6
Protein: 1
Fibre: 1
Sugar: 2
Yum or Not:
As I said in the intro, I had fun plating this in a spring-time tableau. I even heated up the plates a little in the oven. This is the first time I ever did this. I felt pretty durn fancy. I only started caring about presentation at all when I started making my servings so much smaller and there was all kinds of empty space on the plate.
Dinner was the chicken, onion nests, green beans and a mixed green salad for me. Captain Handsome had a little kid salad of iceberg lettuce. I had an awesome vinaigrette I bought at a favourite restaurant in Chelesa, QC, Soupe d'Herbe and the Captain had Catalina. I told the Captain at this meal that once we have kids he's going to have to eat the grown up food with me and I won't make him a kiddie meal. He's going to have to lead by example that all foods are good. He said he won't. We had bought a bottle of Pinot Noir called The Hob Nob (if you read the Hunger Games, you'll know why I was happy with this bottle). It was only OK. The Captain had a couple of glasses. I only drank about half. I thought the BBQ sauce would pair nicely with a red. It might have, but this wine was far too vinegary for me. We saved about a third of the bottle for cooking.
This meal was ultra-yum. The chicken tasted amazing, just a little crispy, the edges of the chicken tasted like they had been cooked on the BBQ. You may not have even noticed that it wasn't cooked on the Q. Everything was cooked perfectly and I couldn't believe that the tiniest bit of sauce did the trick. We didn't need to add even one spoonful of the extra sauce that I made. Before I started watching and counting what I ate, I would have just heaped on the sauce without thinking. I was surprised how little of this delicious sauce packed an amazing flavour punch.
The onion nests are absolutely to die for. I would eat them under anything. They tasted great with fried eggs earlier in the day and amazing with the chicken. They enhanced the taste of the chicken and beans. It was such a simple, but tasty spring-summer meal. It's always good to find something to fill the plate that is (relatively) low carb and lower in starches than say, a potato, rice or pasta side. Also, it's hard to get Captain Handsome to eat spinach, cabbage or spaghetti squash, but he's fully on board with onion nests. It occurred to me that I may be able to sneak in some cabbage next time without him even noticing!
After his third helping (they were small helpings), Captain Handsome declared that there wasn't even enough for him to take leftovers for lunch. I, however, had some the next day on top of grilled veggies I had whipped up and it was just as good one day later, it didn't dry out like I thought it might. (I said the recipe had four servings, and it did, I'd wager that the Captain had 2 1/2 at dinner, I had 1 and then I had another 1/2 the next day).
I whipped up a little sauce with the drippings from the meat. I used the drippings, added some red wine, a few tbsp of butter and heated it over med-high heat until it bubbled and reduced. It was tasty, but the chicken really didn't need it. Now I have a 1/2 c up sauce in the fridge to use for another quick meal later this week!
Without a doubt, this will become a regular in our weekly rotation!
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