Stuffed Chicken Breasts...

Chicken breasts can easily fall into the realm of plain and boring, however this can be avoided if you choose dishes like the one we made for dinner tonight - Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Goat Cheese, Caramelized Spring Onions and Thyme.

Because the filling needs to cool down before you get too far into this, I went right to work with my knife slicing the bulbs of spring onions. Never looked for this type of onion before? These can easily be described as green onions on steroids and as their name implies, usually found during the spring. You may have a harder time locating them in a regular grocery store, but they are more common at farmers' markets - if you can't get them, leeks would work well here.

Caramelizing the onions is not a process that takes to being done quickly, so be sure to take that into account if you try this recipe out. After they were in the pan, the onions took about 20 to 25 minutes to get to the point of being golden and very tender. They were then combined with goat cheese, parsley, a splash of milk and fresh thyme to create the creamy filling. This concoction was then slipped into pockets we made in the meatiest portion of the chicken breasts.

You could bake the breasts if you like, but they can be done in a snap by using a skillet and not having to heat up the house! Cooking them this way also leaves you with intensely flavored bits stuck on the bottom of the pan just waiting for them to be pulled up into a simple sauce. When the chicken was ready, we took the breasts out and set them aside, covering them to keep warm, and poured a couple splashes of white wine into the skillet. After bubbling away, releasing those bits on the bottom, we stirred in broth and let the mixture simmer away until it had reduced, concentrating the flavors. If you wanted a richer sauce, a tablespoon or so of butter stirred in off heat would be nice, but after giving Jeff a taste, we both decided it was good as is and left well enough alone.

I asked Jeff what he thought might be a nice pair to this and he suggested some sort of polenta - I looked through my untried piles to see if any stuck me, but came up empty. However, after looking back through the blog, I ran across this recipe for Creamy Polenta with Thyme we first made back in '07... which was just what I wanted! This is one of the reasons why I love keeping the site updated with all these recipes we push out. After spooning a puddle of the polenta on the plate and adding the breasts on top, we sliced in to find quite juicy meat and a filling that was well-balanced from the tang in the cheese, the slightly sweet onions and the delicate herbaceous whispers from the fresh thyme.

Recipes
Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Goat Cheese, Caramelized Spring Onions and Thyme