My Love-Hate Relationship: Chicken

To prepare yourself, let's all stand up and do the chicken dance! Why? Because I think it's an awesome idea and who doesn't love a little exercise? Here, I'll even include the soundtrack so you don't have any excuse to not participate mkay!


All warmed up? Good! Zumba's got nothing on you honey! Oh, who am I kidding. Only I was lame enough to google blogger (can I use Google as a verb when web searching within other applications??) on how to embed a song in a post, then test it out by playing the entire song and performing the chicken dance to the best of my ability prior to settling down in sweat to finish this post. Phew! Talk about a l o n g sentence. It probably isn't grammatically correct either. My grade school English teachers would be so disappointed. Tsk tsk.

Um, wow! That was quite an intro to today's (eh) post, so if you wanna leave now while I'm still ahead of the game - cool! If not, proceed with caution (why, I'm not sure...)!

Chicken. I probably eat this meat way too often. Don't get me wrong, I love me some chicken and it can be prepped in so many ways, but chicken is, well, chicken. It can get boring so I took a small break from it beginning of February. Last week, I started having chicken withdrawls. So chicken for dinner it is! Super easy peasy new recipe too? Even better!

Hoisin Five-Spice Chicken
Recipe adapted from Elly Says Opa! who adapted it from Cathy's Kitchen Journey who adapted it from Epicurious. Check out Elly's blog to get the full story.

Ingredients
4-6 chicken drumsticks (I used chicken breasts instead)
1/4 cup hoisin sauce
1/2 tsp. Chinese 5-spice powder
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp. honey
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
Amount of red pepper flakes to your liking


Step 1 - combine all the ingredients in a bowl and let the chicken marinate overnight in the fridge (30 minutes should be sufficient as well if you leave it out at room temperature, but you know how marinating goes, the longer, the better!)

It looks like a heart (to me)! I sent this

picture to the hubby, but he said it looked

like something else...

Step 2 - I had this with rice so if you want to as well, I would start that now. If not, then skip this step, of course and proceed to Step 3.

Step 3 - Pre-heat the oven to 425 degrees. Remove the chicken from the marinate and place it into a baking dish. I also drizzled the leftover marinade into the baking dish. This may or may not make cleaning more difficult afterwards. Since you're smarter than me, you probably lined your baking dish with something and made clean up a snap. Yea, I definitely didn't. Thank goodness we're internet friends so I don't have to hear you laughing hysterically at me. :) 

When the oven beeps to let you know it's ready for your chicken, slide the baking dish into the top third of the oven and cook for about 25 minutes (or when it's cooked through). Since the hubby wasn't home, it means veggies for me! Sweet! I made some stir fry baby bok choy with oyster sauce and soy sauce.

Step 4 - When the oven beeps again to notify you its job is complete, remove the baking dish, plate the chicken, scoop some rice over, and add the bok choy.

TA DA! Easy peasy winner winner chicken dinner!

Chicken, hope you've forgiven me for abandonening you for so long. I mean, you got an entire post dedicated to you today so we're cool now right?

What's your take on chicken? Any (simple) yummy chicken recipes to share?


P.S. Why am I talking to chicken breasts like it's human and has feelings? Skurry!