Chicken Thighs with Shallots & Spinach

Hello. . . is it me you're looking for? Hahaha welcome back to my food blogs! This is my second to last blog so I'm going to try to end this with amazing food that will leave you speechless! This recipe is called Chicken Thighs with Shallots & Spinach. It tastes more amazing that how it sounds. Genna Johnson, the founder of this dish, says that it has an "eye-catching presentation and goes together in no time flat for a healthy supper" (A23). The recipe that is given in the cookbook includes white wine. But if you can't use white wine because of certain reasons, the recipe gives the alternative, which is chicken broth. For this recipe, I will use chicken broth, but you're more than welcome to use white wine when doing this yourself. 

The ingredients you'll need are:

• 6 boneless skinless chicken thighs (about 1 1/2 pounds)
• 1/2 teaspoon seasoned salt
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 1 1/2 teaspoons olive oil
• 4 shallot, thinly sliced
• 1/3 cup white wine or reduced-sodium chicken broth
• 1 package (10 ounces) fresh spinach
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup fat-free sour cream

Steps to make this dish:

1. Sprinkle seasoned salt and pepper on both sides of the chicken. Coat a large nonstick skillet with cooking spray and heat the oil over medium heat. Add chicken to the skillet and cook for 6 minutes on each side or until a thermometer reads 170° (or until your chicken is fully cooked). Remove the chicken from the pan and keep the pan warm (Johannes A23).

Step 1 - Sprinkle salt and pepper on chicken and cook on nonstick skillet

Step 1 - Cook chicken until cooked

2. "In same pan, cook and stir shallots until tender. Add wine [or chicken broth]; bring to a boil. Cook until wine [or chicken broth] is reduced by half. Add spinach and salt; cook and stir just until spinach is wilted. Stir in sour cream; serve with chicken" (Johannes A23).

Step 2 - Cook and stir shallots until tender

Step 2 - Add chicken broth

Step 2 - Add spinach and salt

Final Product

This dish was simple to make and is full of flavor! This dish was an enjoyable meal to eat and was worth all the time it took to cook. The spinach, shallots, and chicken broth adds a load of flavor to the chicken and gives the dish a creamy kind of onion flavored base. The onion base taste makes it an amazing dish to eat altogether! Hopefully you try this recipe and love it as much as I did!

Question:

How do you like your chicken? Fried? Grilled? Roasted? What side dishes would you like to go with your chicken? Have you ever tried dishes with white wine in them?

Citation:

Johannes, Genna. "Chicken Thighs with Shallots & Spinach." The Taste of Home Cookbook: Best Loved Recipes from Home Cooks like You. Greendale, Wisc.: Reader's Digest, 2014. A23. Print.

Coconut Cashew Chicken

           Around the world, there are many eating lifestyles such as Vegetarianism, Veganism, Mediterranean Lifestyle, High Fat Low Carb lifestyle, and many more. One that many people don’t really know about, or know very little about, is the Paleo Lifestyle. In Juli Bauer’s “Paleo Cookbook”, she describes the Paleo Lifestyle as being “based on what our ancestors ate and what our bodies were created to eat; simple, unprocessed foods that can be hunted or gathered. But since most of us don’t hunt or gather . . . what we 21^st-century people can do is search for the best-quality meats, plants, nuts, and seeds and BOOM, we’re off to eating Paleo” (Bauer 20). The reason that I picked this book specifically is because I want become a better version of myself by eating healthier and loving myself, become a better cook, if only by a little, and because Paleo foods may change my life in the long run.  

I’m not an expert in cooking, nor do I cook very often. But when I do cook, I find it very enjoyable and it makes me happy when I can serve other people great, healthy food. The recipe that I tried out from Julie Bauer’s “Paleo Cookbook” was Coconut Cashew Chicken Fingers with Spicy Mango Dipping Sauce as shown in the picture below.

                                                            Final product of the dish.

For the amount of cooking experience that I have, and according to my parents, who I cooked for, my dish came out good and delicious. However, the chicken was a little too salty, even with the mango sauce that should have counteracted it. The authors recipe calls for 1 ½ teaspoons of salt for the chickens’ breading (Bauer 88), and next time I decide to make this dish, which will not be too far away, I will use either 1, or a ½ of teaspoon of salt.  

Questions: What are your thoughts on the Paleo Lifestyle? What kind of chicken dishes do you like the most? 

Bauer, Juli, Bill Staley, and Hayley Mason. Juli Bauer's Paleo Cookbook. Las Vegas: Victory Belt, 2015. Print.