Chicken with a Roasted Tomatillo-Cilantro Sauce

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Plan Z Phase: This is a Z2 (ZReduction) recipe. For today’s recipe, we’ll concentrate on a “green theme.” This is March and St. Patrick’s Day will be here soon. Lots of folks wear green and some like to eat something green to celebrate. This is Mexican food made with tomatillos. Tomatillos are GREEN. The sauce might be a greenish-brown when completed but it follows the green theme.

Servings: Serves 2 (can easily be doubled)

Ingredients:

• 1 lb of tomatillos. Take off paper-like skins, rinse and cut in half. Don’t be alarmed that tomatillos are sort of gooey.
• 3 tsp of minced garlic. (jar garlic will work)
• ½ cup of diced onion
• 1 tsp of dried parsley
• 1 cup of chopped, fresh cilantro
• ½ tsp of chili powder
• 1/8- ¼ tsp of cayenne depending on how spicy you want this.
• ¼ cup of whipping cream
• ½ cup of chicken or veggie broth. If you use veggie broth the sauce color will be more green
• 12 oz of chicken scallopini slices. This is just chicken breast sliced thinly. Most grocery stores sell scallopini slices or you can just slice the chicken breast pieces yourself. You can also just leave them whole, but they will take quite a bit longer to cook

Instructions:

This is a pretty easy dish to make but it falls in the gourmet category so I don’t want to leave anything to chance or intimidate novice cooks.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Spray a cookie sheet with olive oil. Place your tomatillo halves flat side down. Roast them for 30 minutes or until the edges just barely begin to brown.

When they are done, take them out of the oven and transfer them to a blender. Be very careful. They are hot.

Add to the blender the onion, garlic, parsley, cilantro, chili powder, and cayenne. Put the top on tightly. When I am blending HOT liquids I always put a towel over the top and hold it down tightly with one hand while I turn the blender on LOW. Then turn it up to whiz the mixture till smooth.

Transfer the mixture to a saucepan. Cook 7 minutes on medium and then strain the sauce through a sieve. Toss out the solids but be sure to mash them against the strainer to get out as much liquid as possible first. You might have to do this in batches if it’s clogging your sieve.

Put the strained sauce in a saucepan and add the cream and the broth. Gently boil the sauce on medium-high until it begins to thicken. This is still a pretty thin sauce but just boil it until you can see it’s got a thickened look to it.

While the sauce is working you can cook your chicken. Lightly spray a large sauté pan with olive oil. Add the thin chicken breast pieces.  Season with sea salt and pepper. Then cook them on medium-high until no pink remains.  This will take about 3 minutes per side. If the chicken is thicker this might take longer.

Put the chicken on the plate and top with 3 Tbl of sauce per person. In my case, I roasted red and yellow peppers and put them on the plate first. Then I topped them with the chicken and the sauce. You can do whatever veggies suit you. This kept my gourmet Mexican theme intact.

Enjoy!

Cheers,