Coconutty Chicken with Spinach & Pasta

When I first mentioned to my husband that I was making a coconutty chicken dish, he was not very excited. He absolutely hates coconut. It's one of the foods that he won't even try to eat, so consequently, I don't make very many sweet or savory dishes with coconut. So, needless to say, I wasn't expecting very great reviews of this dish. I was SHOCKED when my husband ate two helpings of this dinner!

I'm pretty sure that it was the sauce that made this dinner EXTRAORDINARY. I would describe it as a creamy, Asian inspired sauce. It contains coconut milk, cider vinegar, and soy sauce with garlic and an earthy flavor from bay leaves. The chicken is cooked in the sauce, then broiled to give crisp the skin. The sauce is tossed with spinach and served along side orzo pasta.

 LESSON LEARNED: A sauce can make a typical chicken dish taste special.

Recipe for Coconutty Chicken with Spinach & Pasta

Spinach & Bacon Risotto

I think that making risotto is magical. You start with hard, little nuggets of rice, add chicken stock combined with lots of stirring, and end up with creamy puffed-up rice pillows. This dish sounds fancy, but with a little bit of time, you can make this dish very easily. It starts with the rice. In fact, my husband asked "Did you use a special kind of rice?" and I answered "Yep, I used arborio rice!". If you are not familiar with this type of rice, the best way to describe it is a short, fat rice. You can easily find this in any grocery store.

After choosing the correct rice, the next step is stirring. This is the most time-intensive part of the dish and the recipe here is for a "quick" risotto (it only takes 20 minutes of stirring compared to upwards of 45 minutes in a more traditional risotto). I started by cooking bacon until crisp, removing the bacon and part of the bacon fat, sauteing onion/garlic in a little of the leftover bacon fat, toasting the rice, deglazing the pan with some wine (that's just getting all the brown bits off the bottom of the pan), and slowly adding warm chicken stock to the pan. This is where the stirring begins! You constantly stir the rice and add stock once the previous stock cooks out. As you stir, this develops the starch in the rice and this is what makes the dish creamy. I would highly suggest stirring while enjoying a glass of wine! I certainly did!

Once you have used all the chicken stock, stir in some butter and Parmesan cheese. I then added some chopped fresh spinach and tasted the dish for salt. After I plated it, I added some more cheese for good measure. Here's a bonus: we found out that this dish is WONDERFUL as leftovers for lunch!

LESSON LEARNED: Slowly adding stock and stirring is the key to good risotto.

Recipe for Spinach & Bacon Risotto