Stuffed Tomatoes and Roasted Chicken

I was going to start this post off all about  Chicken… but I realized a few people out there might be a bit squeamish reading about a dead bird.  So let’s begin with the tomatoes!

The idea to make Stuffed Tomatoes came to me while I was wandering around the grocery store trying to figure out what I could fix to go with the Roasted Chicken.  Often times I pair it with a potato dish, or sauté some vegetables, but this time I wanted to make something a little different, a bit fancier.

Seeing some nice big red tomatoes, I thought how delicious they would be stuffed with even more goodness.  Deciding what that goodness should be was the easy part; what better to pair with big red tomatoes than something green!  Spinach!  And what goes best with spinach?  Mushrooms!  And what goes best with mushrooms?  Bacon!

That was pretty easy.  I just grabbed some fresh mozzarella to stuff inside and top it off with- and that was that!

The stuffing was easy.  Just rendered some bacon in a pan, tossed in the sliced mushrooms to suck up all that yummy bacon fat, then tossed in some spinach to cook down, a little salt, a little pepper, and it was done.

Next the tomatoes needed to be hollowed out a bit.  This is the part I was less sure about.  Tomatoes do like to fall apart on me when I get try to be fancy cutting them.  Fortunately this time there were zero problems.  I decapitated them, cored them out, got all the seeds and gunk out, and then added some mozzarella, the spinach mixture, and a little more cheese on top.

The whole pan just took twenty five minutes or so in the oven and it was that easy!

Five, six ingredients total?  Definitely worth it.  I’ll make a few changes next time… but let’s say Stuffed Tomatoes are here to stay and have been roommate approved!

As to the flightless fowl…

I hardly ever cook chicken.  I don’t like messing things up and chicken always seemed a bit too fussy to me.  I don’t want dried up tough chicken, nor do I want salmonella poisoning.  Not to mention chicken, is well, chicken.  Not really the most exciting animal.

That is until I realized a chicken is really just a small turkey.

I can feel you shaking or head or smirking at me.  But seriously, I never really thought about them as being more or less the same, until I was really craving some oven baked turkey- think Thanksgiving, and realized I could just do a chicken the same way and that it didn't have to be any more complicated than that.

So while I still don’t like cooking chicken; I can at least enjoy roasting a chicken.

If you are squeamish about touching dead animals, sticking your hand up one, or loosing its skin from its body; then maybe making Roast Chicken isn’t for you…

If all that still sounds fun, then the rest is pretty easy.  All we need to do is give the chicken a good rinse, get the innards out, and pat the sucker dry.  I love crispy skin and moist meat- the best way to guarantee this in my experience is to stuff a bit of butter between the skin and breast meat.  Yum!

I keep my chicken spiced pretty simply.  The breast gets a good dose of Hawaiian Sea Salt, Pepper, and some Brown Sugar… and maybe some more butter.  The extremities get the same, but with some Garlic, Cayenne, Smoked Paprica, and more butter.  Tie the bird together (to help cook it evenly)- or since I don’t have any string I stab my chicken together.

Hide the chicken in the oven for an hour and forget about it!  The smell will remind you when it is almost done!  Though I suggest using an oven timer too.  When it’s done, the chicken just needs a quick rest and is ready to be carved and devoured!