Recipe Rescue: Flavortown Comes to the Kitchen, It’s Chicken!

Chicken is a versatile and healthy protein. I get asked a lot for ideas on how to put a little more flavor into chicken; chicken can be dull. Infusing flavor into chicken is easy and can be done in as little as ten minutes-so let's get clucking, I mean cooking! :)

The biggest question when considering adding flavor to your chicken is what are you looking for?! Do you want something spicy? Rustic? Asian? Once you have figured that out it is easy, not D cooks all the time easy, but really genuinely easy-I promise.

Say tonight you want a rustic, earthy chicken dish that will go well with green beans and potatoes. Take your chicken, I typically use boneless skinless chicken breasts cut in half, horizontally. Chicken breasts are so big these days that I have actually fed my family with two breasts cut in half.  So now that you have them cut in half, if using chicken breasts, place them or whatever cut you are using in a medium bowl. To the bowl add 2 Tbsp Canola oil, salt and pepper, 1 tsp rosemary, 1 tsp minced garlic, 1 tsp of dried parsley-mix well to coat chicken and let sit on the counter for half an hour. At this point you can throw them into the oven or a hot skillet-in the oven they will take 20-30 minutes to cook through (in a 400 degree oven) on the stove top they'll take about 7 minutes on each side.

In addition to the chicken, to bring the meal together you can coat a few potatoes, skin on, with the same marinade mixture. DO NOT use the marinade you had the chicken in as this will contaminate your meal-mix a new marinade for the potatoes and roast them in it, pouring all the extra's from your bowl on top of the potatoes. Roasting potatoes in a 425 degree oven should not take more than an half an hour.

Marinades really help infuse a lot of flavor in a relatively short time when you are dealing with chicken. Remember that lemon is a great flavor booster for chicken, but its a citrus and when left too long in citrus chicken will actually start to toughen up-the meat really turns to a whole different texture when citrus has too much time to infuse itself.

When it comes to infusing more flavor into your chicken its really just about adding your favorite flavors to the chicken with a little oil and about half an hour. Spicier chicken dishes might be marinated with chili peppers, cilantro and cumin... lemon pepper chicken is a great go to anytime chicken flavor combination for the stove top or the grill... baking a whole chicken? Toss some carrots, potatoes, turnips and/or whatever else you like-throw on some olive oil and bake for 1.5 hrs at 350 (I like to also add a can of chicken broth when I roast a whole bird)

Bottom line, with chicken flavortown is a short drive and as long as you have an imagination you'll go far... remember too that if you try and fail with any flavor combination, Noco is infamous for its number of restaurants for all budgets! :)