HermTheWorm’s B.L.O.G.

I’m not a big fan of skinless, boneless chicken breasts. Unless you’re stuffing them with healthy/diet stuff or doing them in a saute pan with a lot sauce (I will give recipes to skinless, boneless in another post or two).

If you want to go with the skinless, boneless and don’t want to wait around for the next post, at least take the breasts and put it between two pieces of saran wrap and hammer it thin with a meat tenderizer, preferably one with sharp surfaces. A whole skinless breast plopped into a frying pan is a big glob that doesn’t taste very good and is difficult to cook evenly. Pounding it down with a meat tenderizer gives you a higher ratio of surface area to inside, obviously the surface area has all the seasoning and searing so you will get tastier breasts. You can also butterfly the breasts (cut them in half the long way, I don’t recommend that, because 9 out of ten times if you don’t have amazing knife skills you are going to get one thin piece and one thicker piece that won’t cook evenly).

Enough about heinous skinless, boneless chicken breasts.

My favorite way to enjoy chicken breasts is on the bone. The bone imparts more flavor (Why does that sound perverted?). I usually do it on the bone without skin (Sounds pervy again), sometimes with, depending on how cut I feel I’m looking at the time. My vanity dictates what is on the menu.

The smoked schmoosh technique:

This is pretty much the simplest and perhaps my favorite way to do chicken breast on the bone.

It is easy as pie, too.

You start with a can of Chipotle Peppers in adobo sauce, which you can pick up in the international food section of every supermarket.

Open up the can and dump it into a bowl. These are little smoked chipolte peppers in tomato sauce. Go in there with one or two hands and schmoosh the peppers. Think: how people used to schmoosh grapes with their feet back in the day. Schmoosh away.  Pre-heat the oven as high as it will go for maybe 15 minutes (I say "maybe" because there are a lot of anal retentive bastards out there who will stare at their damn watches for 15 minutes, I’d rather stare at Gent magazine "The home of the D cups" for 15 minutes, around 15 minutes is fine.)

Pull the skin off the chicken breasts and dump them in the bowl, take your hands and massage the scmooshed chipotles all over the chicken breasts. You don’t even need to marinate them, these smokey little devils pack a wallop of taste. set them in a broiler pan in the center of your oven. Spoon half the remaining chipotles on top. Throw that sucker in the oven.

After it is halfway done (You should know when a piece of chicken is halfway done by now, if not, just guess, it’s not f-cking rocket science.), turn it over and spoon the other half of the schmooshed chipotles on top of the chicken pieces. Continue until done.

Nothing to it.

It’s almost a sin to think something this easy could taste so good, so be careful on rainy days for bolts of lighting coming through your window or plauges of loucusts.

Finish this off with Melinda’s hot sauce or cackalacky sauce (links to follow). Melindas isn’t very hot, just absolutely delicious and cackalacky isn’t hot in the slightest.

(More chicken by the piece ideas to follow, I wouldn’t call these "recipes" as they are just simple preparations for those of us who don’t want to fuss around–sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.)

…To be continued…