Chicken 2 ways: Mediterranean-Style Stuffed Chicken Breasts and Fiery Asian Chicken

While I'm furloughed by the government shutdown, there's time to do some week-night cooking. I dug through my paper recipe clippings (neglected now that I mostly save recipes to try in the Paprika app) and came up with these two.

Mediterranean-Style Stuffed Chicken Breasts I found on Leite's Culinaria, but it originated in a Kraft Foods cookbook. It's an old-style suffed chicken breast recipe, this time with a cream cheese base (Kraft, duh), bacon, Kalamata olives, almonds, and thyme. I used 3 large breasts instead of the 4 small called for, but otherwise followed the recipe.

It was pretty good, though I found the almonds provided an odd crunch (the bacon de-crisped itself once folded into the cream cheese and cooked, so no crunch there). Most of the Leite's testers seemed to like that crunch, but to me it was just...odd. And didn't add any flavor.

If I repeat this one, the almonds are out. I also made some of it without the olives as the plan had been to share dinner prep with the folks next door--a couple of olive-avoiders over there. The plan fell through (sister-in-law came in from a harried work day and moved straight into dinner prep on her own), so I'll try those as leftovers.


The Fiery Asian Chicken originated on Always Order Dessert. I used bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs and grilled them (no picture, sorry). They were good, but pretty dominantly "hot" without much balance from the other ingredients. Not too spicy for me, just not a superior recipe. Might get repeated, might not...