Wednesday, March 01, 2006

A slightly different way to prepare chicken breasts



Brenda Theune’s Cheesy Chicken
500 More Low-Carb Recipes Copyright 2004

2 boneless, skinless frozen chicken breasts I used 5 smaller breasts and they were thawed
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 tablespoons butter, softened
2 tablespoons cream I omitted this
1 tablespoon minced onion
¼ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon seasoned salt I used regular salt and I added too much
½ cup shredded cheese I used 2% colby/jack

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Place the chicken breasts on a 9”x9” baking pan spray with nonstick cooking spray. Mix together the cream cheese, butter, cream, onion, and spices. Spread the mixture evenly over the breasts. Put the cheese on top of the sauce. (Oops! I blended the shredded cheese into the cream cheese but I recommend doing it that way since I think the cheese would burn otherwise.) Bake for about 45 minutes or until done.

This would have been really good had I not oversalted the cheese mixture. There's a similar recipes in one of my Food and Wine Quick From Scratch books that only uses cream cheese mixed with veggies that I've been meaning to try but I was worried it might be too bland. I think the shredded cheese added a lot the flavor here. You could really play around with this - adding more veggies for color and flavor and varying the type of cheese you use. You can even use flavored cream cheese. Overall, a good concept. A little bit of the cheese mixture slid off the chicken but enough of it stayed on.

I picked up both 500 Low-Carb Recipes and 500 More Low-Carb Recipes after sampling the first book from the library. This second book actually includes calories in the nutritional information, and it can be a bit scary. This particular recipe was quite scary although I don't know what size chicken breast they assume in their calculations. I used small ones and spread the cheese mixture over 5 breasts instead of 2 breasts (that would be ridiculous no matter how big they were), and I omitted the cream and used 2% cheese. Some of the cheese mixture slid off too so hopefully I can in under the 600+ calories that they book listed (I told you it was scary!) I will say, I served this only with a simple side salad and I never even thought about eating the rest of the evening (unusual for me).

Question of the Day: Would you like to see nutritional information with every recipe in every cookbook?

3 comments:

The Cookbook Junkie said...

I think that would be kind of depressing to be honest. I like having a selection of 'healthy' cookbooks that contain nutritional info but I don't think I would be able to make a lot of the recipes I make from my other cookbooks if I knew exactly how many calories were in them.

Randi said...

Umm, no, cause sometimes you just dont want to know.

Anonymous said...

I would love it.I have a lot of cookbooks that I have favorite recipes in,but I don't know any of the nitritional info on them.