This is the best type of recipe – it is easy-peasy, but looks like you worked at it, and it tastes pretty good, too. This is a great recipe for a beginning cook.
Get a pack of 8-10 “skinny” chicken breasts (the flat, small size, often offered as a buy-one/get-one-free special at the supermarket). You will also need sliced deli ham (splurge on the good stuff) and sliced Swiss cheese, one or two pieces per chicken breast.
Melt a stick of butter in a medium bowl and pour a cup or so of generic breadcrumbs in another bowl. You don’t need panko or fancy breadcrumbs for this. Mix some Italian seasoning in with the breadcrumbs.
Place a slice or two of ham and a slice or two of Swiss cheese on each chicken breast. Roll the breast up around the ham/cheese and dunk it into the butter, then roll in the breadcrumbs. Place each one in a baking dish; their sides can touch.
Pop into the oven at 350F or 375F; it is a very forgiving dish and can go in the oven at whatever temperature other foods may be cooking. Bake for about 30 minutes or until they are golden brown on the outside, the chicken is cooked through, and the cheese is melted on the inside.
It looks like this could be thrown together fairly quickly. After work for instance, or if you find out last minute there will be guests for dinner. Assuming we ever have guests for dinner again. Another winner, Ellie!
Thank you, Hannibal. This is just so simple and looks liked it required work. You can also sprinkle on any fresh herbs that you may have floating around your kitchen before baking.
Butter vs egg wash is an interesting choice. I never thought to use butter before but you can be sure I’m going to use it from now on
Or (ahem) margarine or canola oil #heart healthy.
Blasphemy.
butter or gtfo
(I jest, I am sure there are tons of options which will be delicious)
Who are you, Paula Deen? Lol
I love chicken cordon bleu and make it sometimes. This sentence led me to veer off-track:
“Get a pack of 8-10 “skinny” chicken breasts (the flat, small size, often offered as a buy-one/get-one-free special at the supermarket).”
In the Greatest City in the World™ we have none of this. When I (used to, pre-COVID-19) visit my relatives they’d casually say, “I don’t know, Whole Foods is having a sale on these baby carrots that I want, and then at Trader Joe’s…”
And they just drove up and waltzed right in. Here, every trip to a WF or TJ’s is like entering Thunderdome. Even pre-pandemic there were lines out the door, aggression in the aisles, just awful. “Give peace a chance”? Not these folks. Upscale progressives will not be denied their [insert the most ridiculous product, like “organic water” or TJ’s frozen organic (heavily processed and probably toxic) foods shipped in from the PRC.]
When I go on these trips with my siblings I accompany them and ask them what they buy. “Well, snacks, stuff to keep around the house. I think these stores are geared toward rich people who like heating up frozen foods and pretend they’re cooking. I mean look at this.” My sibling was holding up some sad leafy green from WF. “It’s like it’s from a collectivized farm and the producer family is hoarding the good stuff for their family.”
“You could add it to a stew and…”
‘At $11.99/lb.? No, the next stop is [supermarket X], where we do the real shopping. You could get three of these things in better condition for under two dollars.”
Bingo. The only thing I get at Whole Shitshow are white sweet potatoes because I literally can’t get them anywhere else (and they’re a pain in the ass to grow). I only get the handmade whole wheat tortillas from TJ’s because they’re as close as I can get to a real tortilla in these parts. Every other brand of flour tortilla I’ve tried outside of NM is so full of preservatives and other garbage that I can taste the chemistry. Tortillas are, at their essence, flour, water, fat and salt. You can’t hide all those goddamned preservatives behind something as simple as that.
All my other groceries come from a regular grocery store. It’s not that hard to avoid the trash food.
A good friend works at Whole Foods and they treat their workers terrible. I shop there as little as possible. I like Trader Joe’s though.
Mrs. Butcher and I both worked for those fuckers for less than a year. This was even before the Amazon takeover, so during that time when their PR machine liked to say it was such a great place to work. It most assuredly is not. If you look in the dictionary under “feudalism”, the definition states “Whole Foods Market.”
When I first heard about the Amazon deal, I laughed my ass off.
yeah, this was a while back, but the previous founder?owner?head? of Whole Foods is a climate change denier, and had some really shitty policies on how they treated workers. I think there was something about the employee discount being based on that employee’s BMI.
and now Amazon owns them, I think? which also has a super shitty track record for how they treat employees.
On the other hand, I’ve heard from a few people who work there that Trader Joe’s pays their employees decently. But the shoppers in there are dangerous, and shouldn’t be allowed to use shopping carts.
I’m like Chance in “Being There,” I stumble into all kinds of things that I don’t really understand but I’m a curious and adventurous sort.
I used to get sent for two weeks a year to San Francisco, for business. I was about 30. I was introduced to a friend of a friend and we hit it off, so after work he and I spent some evenings and weekends together. One beautiful Fall Saturday I called him up and said I wanted to walk down to SoMA (from Nob Hill, but I was young and spry) and he agreed to come with me, because he had never been either. Where we were going was a little sketchy at the time. [I’ll tell you abut my adventure in the Tenderloin at some other point.]
So we wandered around and we came upon something called Trader Joe’s. It was vast and empty and they were practically giving the stuff away. I decided to load up. Two-buck chuck, delightful California cheeses for $1.99 a pound, grapes, olives, I went wild.
“Why do you think the people are wearing Hawaiian shirts?”
“Maybe this is a Hawaiian chain?”
No. It was the second TJ’s on the planet, I later learned. I said to my friend, “I can’t imagine this place will last long. They’re giving stuff away below cost and still there’s no one in here except for the overly friendly employees wearing Hawaiian shirts…” “They have organic milk and here in San Francisco that’s kind of big, but I think you’re right.”
Fun fact: Unless you are a manager at TJ’s, you are designated as a part timer. Doesn’t matter how many hours you work either.
While I have travelled a decent amount and like to think of myself as not stereotypical midwestern all the time, there are key moments where I am very self-aware that I’m midwestern as fuck.
Grocery stores are a prime example. Not necessarily Whole Paycheck, because why burn my money like that, but when I visit Connecticut for work (pre-pandemic) I was always flabbergasted that there were no big grocery stores. Like if all you have are corner bodegas, what do you do for the less-popular-to-others-but-thing-you-love stuff???? How many bodegas do people have to go to for all their groceries?
Where did you go? Hartford? Or maybe Stamford? Connecticut is one vast suburb connected by highways and parkways with a small city or two thrown in for fun every so often.
I once went on a road trip with a friend who wanted to see Ye Olde Historick Mystic. If you spend 3 hours at the aquarium your visit will last for about 3 hours and 15 minutes. It was a beautiful day so I suggested we pick up some food at a supermarket and picnic along the waterfront somewhere. I don’t know what town we were in but the supermarket was the size of 2 football fields. It was overwhelming so we just went to the deli counter and got heroes (I think they’re called “subs” up there) and found a park along the water and watched the boats go by.
“How many people must live around here to support this supermarket? You could feed half of Manhattan with what they have.”
“Maybe they’re big eaters? It seems awfully quiet. There’s not much else to do except eat I guess and maybe visit a historic home from time to time but that must get old really fast.”
I remember really liking these when they had them in the various dining halls and such. Although it violates my very-strong one-pot-preference, that does look not too difficult.
And now that I’m going to be “working” from home again for the next week or so, I may try some more cooking…