Make This Feast!

Hold on to your hat/horses/ass, Gentle Reader, because I'm about to rave madly about a pair of recipes that don't have obvious Asian, North African or Latin origins.

Have you braced yourself? Good, because here we go.

Roast Chicken With Balsamic Bell Peppers3/4 t salt, divided
3/4 t fennel seeds, crushed
1/2 t black pepper, divided
1/4 t garlic powder
1/4 t dried oregano
4 6-oz. skinless, boneless chicken breasts
2 T olive oil, divided
2 C thinly sliced red bell pepper
1 C thinly sliced yellow bell pepper
1/2 C thinly sliced shallots (about 1 large)
1 1/2 t chopped fresh rosemary
1 C fat-free, reduced-sodium chicken broth
1 T balsamic vinegar

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
   
2. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat.
   
3. Combine half a teaspoon of salt with the crushed fennel, a quarter-teaspoon of black pepper, garlic powder and oregano.
   
4. Brush the chicken with 1 1/2 teaspoons of oil; , then sprinkle the spice rub over it.
   
5. Add 1 1/2 teaspoons of oil to pan, then add the chicken and cook 3 min. or until browned.
   
6. Turn the chicken over and cook 1 min.
   
7. Arrange the chicken in an 11 x 7–inch baking dish coated with cooking spray.
   
8. Bake the chicken for 10 min. or until done.
   
9. Heat the remaining olive oil over medium-high heat.
   
10. Add the bell peppers, shallots and rosemary and sauté 3 min.
    
11. Stir in the broth, scraping the pan with a wooden spoon to loosen any browned bits.
    
12. Reduce the heat and let the mixture simmer 5 min.
    
13. Increase the heat back to medium-high.
    
14. Stir in the vinegar along with a quarter-teaspoon each of salt and pepper.
    
15. Cook the mixture 3 min., stirring frequently.
    
16. Serve the bell pepper mixture over the chicken.

Yield: 4 servings of a breast half and 1/2 C of bell pepper mixture

Nutritional Info
Calories: 282
Fat: 11 g
Sat fat: 2.1 g
Protein: 35.9 g
Carbs: 8.8g
Fiber: 1.9 g
Cholesterol: 94 mg
Sodium: 644 mg

Normally I'd put my futzings here, but once again I ask you to hold on to your hat/horses/ass, Gentle Reader, because I'm not finished yet with the recipe fun and believe my futzings will be better presented all together.

Roasted Red Potatoes With Rosemary6-8 small red potatoes, quartered into 1/2" pieces
1 T olive oil or garlic-flavored olive oil
1 T minced fresh rosemary leaves
1/2 t salt
1/4 t ground black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
   
2. Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl, then toss to coat the potatoes.
3. Transfer the potatoes to a large baking sheet or shallow roasting pan.
   
4. Roast the potatoes 25-30 min. or until they're tender and golden.

Nutritional Info
Unfortunately, the fine folks at FoodNetwork.com--or at least the ones posting celebrity "chef" Robin Miller's recipes--don't see fit to include nutritional info with the recipes. That's probably a good thing for the site, for if visitors got a gander at the nutritional info for Paula "Queen of Butter" Deen's recipes, they'd flee and set Google to block search results from showing her stuff.

All Hail the Queen of Butter!

The Faudie's Futzings
I'm getting spoiled by having a Sprouts closer to home. This week, the store had red and yellow bell peppers for 69 cents each, as well as fresh, hormone-free, boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $1.77 a pound. Those prices may not strike you as great deals, Gentle Reader, but they are to me--and I recommend you get out to shop more often so you know what grocery prices are these days. Even at low-price HEB, the asking price for hormone-free chicken is upwards of $3 a pound.

Anywho, I'd spied the roast chicken recipe in my freebie January issue of Cooking Light and aimed to make it if I ever got my mitts on some cheap red bell peppers. Imagine how grateful I was when Sprouts obliged not just with the bell peppers but with the chicken as well.

While I had the ingredients at the ready by and large, I had to futz. I'm The Faudie, after all, and futzing is what I do.

• While Sprouts had yellow bell peppers on sale, I didn't waste my money on them. Yellow bells have no flavor, in the opinions of both me and the husband.
  
• I didn't use more than half a teaspoon of salt total. Yes, Gentle Reader, I know its importance as a flavor differentiator, I just don't like using that much of it. My taste buds, long "deprived" of excess sodium since I don't ingest a lot of processed foods, can detect salt quite well, and I just don't enjoy that sensation.
  
• While I did purchase fennel seeds at a post-yoga trip to Central Markup (the seeds I thought we had for the husband's six-seed bread were all gone), I also purchased a small quantity of ground fennel just in case, y'know, I didn't feel like getting out my mortar and pestle and doin' a little crushin'. Which I didn't when I finally moved on in the day's culinary misadventures to start this recipe.
  
• I didn't coat the raw chicken in olive oil before applying the spice rub. I figured between the nonstick skillet and the teaspoon or so of olive oil I put in it before adding the chicken, I had enough fat and slick for decent browning. Furthermore, the spice rub had no trouble sticking to the raw chicken without the help of the oil.
  
• I used about two teaspoons of freshly chopped rosemary, purloined from the neighbor's rosemary shrub (bush? plant?). I'd told the husband to acquire a good-sized branch since I needed for both the chicken and the potatoes, and he delivered--and then some. I didn't like the prospect of the rosemary going to waste, so I used a wee bit more. It's a crime to waste something you've stolen.
  
• I didn't add any more olive oil to the skillet before preparing the bell peppers and shallots. The oils from the chicken preparation were infused with the flavors of fennel, pepper, garlic and oregano, and I wanted to try to transfer that flavor to the peppers and shallots.

By the by, Gentle Reader, I'll have you know I bought a shallot for the recipe on my weekly HEB trip. I'd only purchased shallots once, years ago, for a Korean recipe. Those shallots, packaged in a cellophane bag, were tiny, withered things that I recall not even using. This shallot, on the other hand, seemed large in comparison. Imagine my surprise when I started slicing into the thing and discovered it's like a pale red onion.

It's a real shallot!

In the magazine, the recipe is paired with one for mascarpone mashed potatoes, and after preparing the bell pepper topping, I understand why: The bell pepper mixture doesn't really thicken. It's a bunch of softened bell pepper strips and shallots swimming in a thin but tasty liquid composed of chicken broth and balsamic vinegar. I had thought the sauce would thicken slight, as it does in our favorite chicken with balsamic bell peppers and red onions dish. Nope, not here, thus the mashed 'taters are there to sop up the juice.

But I didn't know that until after the fact. That's why I thought my idea to pair the chicken with the red potatoes lightly flavored with rosemary that we'd get every now and then at the Central Markup Cafe would be a fantastic pairing. Yes, it's not the most imaginative pairing--two rosemary dishes--but for me to even consider preparing some kind of potato side dish is a huge stretch, Gentle Reader. I stay far away from potatoes.

Yet when I was at Central Markup after my yoga class, I found myself buying four palm-sized red potatoes at 99 cents a pound. I knew as I selected them that I could get then for 89 cents a pound or less at my local HEB, but I really didn't want to make another post-yoga stop. Then to top it all off, the checker tried to charge me the price for the "C" red potatoes, those iddy-biddy ones sometimes dubbed baby red potatoes, that go for $1.19 a pound. Sorry, lady, there's a noticeable difference between the C reds and the A reds, which I bought. Grrr.

If you're going to point out, Gentle Reader, that I could have bought some roasted red potatoes with rosemary from the cafe while I was shopping at Central Markup, you needn't. Those potatoes are kind of pricey, and I was looking forward to trying my hand at roasting my own potatoes, oddly enough. Since I'd be baking cookies out the wazoo for the boy to give to his classmates on his birthday (not homemade cookies, but instead six packages of Nestle mint chocolate chip cookies, with two portions mushed together to form bigger cookies, which I scored for a buck a piece at HEB some weeks back), I knew I'd have the oven hot and ready to go. Plus the recipe's just so damn simple, how could I resist an opportunity to see how badly I could muck it up?

When I made the potatoes, I used the lemon-flavored olive oil I use far too infrequently (largely because I'm so unsure how to use it to make the most of its lemon flavor). Rosemary and lemon seemed an appropriate combination to me. Fortunately, I was right. After 30 minutes of roasting atop a piece of parchment paper I put over one of the baking sheets I'd used while baking cookies, the potato wedges came out warm, fragrant and flavorful.

And a bit too early. I'd underestimated the skillet-cooking time for the chicken breasts, so they went into the oven about 10 minutes after the potatoes had come out. So much for time management! But it's not really my fault entirely. You can't buy 6-ounce chicken breasts around here. They're all friggin' huge. In fact, for this recipe, I used two breasts and halved them lengthwise; cutting them in half widthwise would have resulted in to super thick halves that would take at least twice the time to cook as their two thin companions.

Of course, the chicken needed additional time in the oven to cook through completely, which meant my tasty potatoes were cooling atop the oven far longer than I'd hoped. Fortunately, though, they were still pretty warm when at last the chicken was finished and ready to be served.

While we lacked mashed potatoes to sop up the juice from the mixture, we did have some foccacia, topped with sliced veggies and a load of Parmesan cheese, that we'd scored on the discount rack at Sprouts a few weeks back. The baked Parmesan tasted more like cream cheese it was so sweet, so I found it to be a nice pairing with the faint citrus of the potatoes and the savoriness of the fennel-laced chicken, shallots and bell peppers.

I suppose the culinary powers of the universe found favor with me on this day, for my pairing of rosemary recipes didn't just work well--they rocked our taste buds. The three human residents of Chez Boeckman-Walker were quite enthralled by the feast, and even the feline residents seemed jealous of our fine dining.

Based on these results, Gentle Reader, I highly recommend these recipes to you. They're not difficult and make for a flavorful meal you could even prepare without shame for guests. Happy feasting!