I can't remember if I've mentioned it yet, but one of the best gifts I got last year, and one of the most useful, is my new foodsaver. For a while, I'd been buying bulk and freezing (meat, I mean) for those evenings when I really didn't want to head out to the grocery store and found myself scratching my head as to what to make for dinner.
Now that I have the foodsaver, I don't feel so bad about using so many ziplocs, for one, and an individual chicken breast defrosts a lot easier than two stuck together in the same bag. Never mind the fact that the meat doesn't get all freezerburned as easy (they tend not to stay in there long enough for that in the ziplocs anyway, but it is a plus for the foodsaver).
So I was in this spot a few weeks back. What to make, no desire to head to the store, and just staples in the kitchen. So I defrosted two chicken breasts and headed to my collection of saved recipes (yes, I hoard. I see something that sounds good, I bookmark it, and eons later I've yet to try it).
I picked Rachel Ray's Latin Chicken and Rice Pot -- a one pot meal with a bell pepper and green olive salsa and avocado sour cream. Plus the weather was nasty and this seemed like the right thing to warm me up. Throw on some Wallander and I made a weekend out of it with leftovers, too.
The recipe was super easy to put together. I don't know that I'd consider it a favorite, but if you're used to jambalaya, this is sort of a variation on that. Same basic cooking technique. The only real problem I had, though, was in cooking the rice. Rice tends to take longer here in Colorado anyway, and nowhere in the recipe does it say to cover the rice while cooking, which resulted (as I'd suspected it would) in a dry pot with raw rice. No big deal, I added more stock, brought it back to a boil, and covered it to cook longer.
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