Ricotta and Spinach Stuffed Chicken Breast

After writing this post, I decided that I should start enhancing my own family meal planning skills by creating some quick simple recipes. I'm not planning on having children anytime soon or anything so maybe developing my family meal planning skills is a little premature. However, I will be starting graduate school in a month and having some standby recipes ready in case of hunger emergencies seems wise.

I made this recipe up a few days ago while in the grocery store. I tried to keep the ingredient list simple with common components and the prep relatively quick. It turned out quite well and Ken said it was excellent (which is not a rating he gives lightly).













Ingredients:
4 chicken breasts
1 package frozen spinach
(thaw and press out water)
1 small container ricotta cheese
1 onion
1 small can of tomato paste
1/4 C sherry
3 T butter
1 T olive oil
cooking twine

First, I finely diced the onion. (You want to make sure the onion is really finely diced so that you don't end up with raw onion chunks in the filling.) Then, I mixed about 1/3 of the diced onion, the thawed spinach, and some of the ricotta cheese in a bowl. Use your own judgment as to the amount of cheese. I would say you don't want the filling to be too soupy or too dry. Next, I used a meat mallet to pound the chicken breasts. This doesn't take much time and makes a difference in how easy the breasts are to stuff and how tender they are. Then, I put probably a 1/4 C (or less) of the filling on the rough side of the breast, wrapped the edges of the chicken around it, tied the bundle with twine, and lightly salted the chicken. (See picture for how I tied the twine).

Once all the breasts were prepped, I turned the oven to 350 and began browning the chicken (2 at a time) in a hot non-stick pan (with about 1 T of oil). I then put the chicken in a small casserole dish, dotted each breast with a little butter, and put it in the oven to cook.

While the chicken cooked, I started the sauce. I left the browned bits in the pan and added the sherry to deglaze. I let the sherry cook off and then added about 1 T of butter. Once the butter melted, I tossed the rest of the onion into the pan. I let the onions cook until they were soft and then added a few spoonfuls of tomato paste. I browned the paste a little and then turned the heat off to wait for the chicken to cook.
Once the juice from the chicken in the oven ran clear (about 30 minutes), I removed the chicken and put it on a plate to cool. I poured all of the chicken juice from the casserole pan into the frying pan with the onions and turned the heat back on. I let the sauce cook down for a few minutes while I removed the twine from the breasts and got everything set up for dinner. All that's left is to serve and eat. I would recommend serving the chicken with a vegetable of some kind and possibly a side of buttered herbed pasta.

A few suggestions from Ken:
He really liked the sauce but thought there should be more of it. Perhaps adding tomatoes and chicken stock would be helpful.
Also, he mentioned that there is another (prettier) way to stuff chicken breasts. It sounded like it involved injecting the filling into the breast. It sounded complicated but maybe we'll try that someday.