Father's Day Favorite

Well, I decided to go back into our family favorites and recreate one of these dishes for Father's Day. I chose to take the favorite classic of baked drumsticks in tomato sauce over some sort of carb and a vegetable side.

First, the chicken! We have always done straight up tomato sauce with this dish, which is good... but I prefer a chunkier sauce rather than a viscous fluid. So, I chopped up a yellow onion and several cloves of garlic to put in with it. This wasn't enough, so I went ahead and added in some canned diced tomatoes instead of some of the sauce. There was still some canned tomato sauce, but not nearly as much.

It looked great going into the oven!

I added a little bit of water to the mix to help the sauce stuff move around and actually cover more of the chicken. After seeing how it came out, I disagree with this and will not do it next time... or only add a teensy.

Now, the vegetable side. We usually had canned green beans with this, but I wasn't in the mood to cook up the green beans and Dad wanted squash. I usually boil squash, but in the spirit of reinvention and doing things a teensy bit differently, I went ahead and sauteed them in some olive oil. They turned out great and I will probably do it this way again.

Last, but not least, we used to typically have this served over plain white rice. Rather than bust out the clunky rice cooker, I just went ahead and fixed some tricolor rotini noodles. Not the best, but honestly it's empty carbs either way and it may as well be interesting.

I also insisted we have a salad with this meal, as I had picked up two rather large packages of different salad mixes when I couldn't make up my mind at the store. It was good and I added in some carrots and mushrooms so it was not particularly boring, but obviously not worth taking a picture.

Tomato Baked Chicken Recipe:

Ingredients:
12 - 16 drumsticks (please decrease this if you need, we just have a gigantic family)
3  8 oz cans of tomato sauce, no salt added
2 14.5 oz cans of diced tomatoes (in this case I got flavored: Italian and Garlic + Olive Oil)
1 yellow onion, chopped
5 - 6 cloves of garlic
3 tbsp ground pepper

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 425 F
2. Arrange drumsticks in suitable pan for roasting with some space between.
3. Pour tomato sauce, diced tomato, onions, garlic over drumsticks
4. Add a small amount of water to mix the sauce a bit
5. Sprinkle black pepper over chicken
6. Bake in oven for 40 minutes
7. Remove from oven and turn drumsticks over, then place back in for another 40 minutes
8. Serve over rice or noodles with sauce ladeled over and enjoy!

Spinach/Tomato/Mushroom Chicken

So, tonight I cooked dinner. It turned out amazing and fabulous, as always. *snerk*


The idea initially originated with my sister saying, "You should bake some chicken with lots of garlic and spinach". Challenge accepted.... but I didn't want to leave it at that. So, I got 8 oz of sliced mushrooms from the store... pre-sliced because I am a lazy, lazy woman. LAZY. I got two roma tomatoes and chopped them, which was NOT lazy. It balances out.  I didn't put all of the roma tomatoes in with it, maybe only one and a half. The other half of the tomato went in with green beans. Huzzah. Anyway, there is also spinach. Not the crazy Popeye canned stuff, but the leafy fresh stuff.

Ingredients assembled! Away! I had intended to drizzle all of this with olive oil... but we were out so my dad had this interesting dipping olive oil, sort of like what they give you at Carino's, except purchased from a store and apparently outrageously expensive. So, I used it... and it was good. I have no idea what seasonings were in it, but I am going to shamelessly yoink my success from its clutches and laugh in its face.

So, you put the oil on the cookie sheet/roasting pan thing. Enough to coat. Put down a veritable bed of spinach. Season with garlic powder, minced garlic, paprika, and whatever the hell was in the dipping oil. Arrange chicken. Season again. Smatter the aforementioned tomatoes and mushrooms all over in a pretty sort of assembly.

Did I mention you should have preheated the oven? Yes. To 400 degrees. Place into oven. Cook for twenty minutes. Flip chicken breasts over, which is actually pretty hard because it has spinach stuck to it. Cook another twenty minutes or until done. Huzzah. You are finished. Serve on shameless wild rice in a box and nom until you can nom no more.

According to weight watchers, this has... three points for the chicken breast and I'm going to say 1 or 2 for the oil. Not too shabby. The rice itself probably only has about 5. I also served this with a teensy amount of green beans mixed with the tomato and some onion cooked in the microwave... because I'm fancy like that.