Saturday, June 09, 2007

Grilled stuffed chicken breasts


It's not really a big secret - but we eat a lot of chicken. To prevent chicken fatigue, sometimes it's necessary to kick things up a notch and take the old-school grilled chicken breast to a new level. With some sage advice from my grilling mentor Steven Raichlen - we tweaked his basic recipe just a bit with some really tasty results.

Ingredients
3 -4 large chicken breasts
7-8 large basil leaves or equivalent
5-6 pieces of sun dried tomatoes
1 chunk of asiago cheese

Marinade
1 cup olive oil
juice from 1 lemon
2-3 crushed garlic cloves
salt
pepper

Trim the "tenderloins" and any fat off the chicken breasts and cut each breast in half. Place each half flat on a cutting board and, using the palm of one hand to hold the breast flat, cut a deep horizontal pocket in the side with a slender knife. Make the pocket as large as you can without piercing the top or bottom of the breast. As for the stuffing, we chose to use asiago cheese, fresh lemon basil leaves, and sun-dried tomatoes - but pretty much anything within reason would work. Insert the stuffing into the pocket and seal the breast with toothpicks. Lay the breasts in a flat pan and cover with the marinade, flipping a couple times to coat both sides. We marinated for 20-30 minutes, but the real flavor comes from the stuffing. Grilling time is basically the same as for normal chicken breasts - probably 10 minutes or so on medium high.

This is a really easy, quick way to spice up the usual chicken breast routine and also provides a way to show off some fancy grill marks on the outside and an impressive cross section of flavors on the inside. This is something we'll definitely be doing again.

4 comments:

Stew said...

Hi there...dropping a note from one Durham One Local Summer participant to another!

Dot Com Mom said...

Did you take the summer off? Where are you?

Ron Simpson said...

I love Steven Raichlen's Barbecue Bible. I did a reveiw on it on my blog a long time ago. http://clutteredeclecticmind.blogspot.com/2006/10/barbecue-bible-by-steven-raichlen.html

Starsricha said...

Hmmm love stuffed chicken! yum yum!