Chicken with Balsamic Fig Sauce, Wild Rice, and a Side Vegetable

[elfs]

I've been raving about my recipe for Balsamic-and-Fig Chicken Dinner for a few weeks now, but haven't quite put it up out for other people to read about. This recipe exists because HelloFresh and HomeChef (the people who supply Kroger, my local mega-chain of grocery stores) both have competing versions of this recipe, and both are so full of waste, and so overpriced that I needed to come up with my own.

This recipe includes one of my favorite cooking utensils. It's not particularly obscure, but I rarely see anyone talking about it: the shot glass. That's right, those little things for drinking booze. I have six, and the only thing they're ever used for is cooking.

So here we go:

Balsamic-and-Fig Chicken with mixed rice and something green, for two.

Ingredients:

• One chicken breast, about 10oz. (Just get it from the grocery's butcher table, wrapped in wax paper.)


• Rice medly (Trader Joe's Rice Medly, Lundberg "Wild Rice Blend". My local co-op has a "bulk organic wild rice blend" that's less than two dollars a pound.)


• One large head of fresh broccoli or 12oz fresh green beans


• Dijon mustard


• Balasmic vinegar


• Fig jam. (Really, any jam will do. Try it with blueberry!)


• White wine (a small box of cheap white wine will do fine. And it'll keep okay in the 'fridge, so you can make this meal a lot. Or, you know, you can just drink the rest.)


• Olive Oil


• Butter


• Garlic


• Salt & pepper


• Chicken broth

Optional or substitution ingredients:

• Butter: If you're dairy-free, feel free to skip it in the rice. It's a nice-to-have, but not necessary.


• Wine: If you're alcohol-free, use chicken broth instead, but...


• Chicken broth: if you don't have any and don't care to keep it around, because you're going to use only a little for the broccoli or green beans in this recipe, feel free to use water instead. However, if you're going to use chicken broth instead of wine, you should have some broth on-hand; water will work, but you'll lose some of the flavor. I like the bottles of broth concentrate; the salt content kills almost any bacterian and they last for months.

My house keeps everything on this list around except the chicken and the vegetables. Yours may differ, and that's okay.

Equipment:

• A microwave


• A stove top with two burners


• Two timers (you have them on your stove or your phone)


• One frying pan & a spatula


• One pot with a lid


• One casserole dish with a lid


• A cutting board & kitchen knife


• Wax paper


• Spoons


• Two shot glasses


• A mesh colander (the thing you use to drain spaghetti)

Procedure:

1. Measure 4 full shot-glasses of rice and put them into the colander. Rinse the rice for about twenty seconds under cold running water.


2. Measure 6 full shot-glasses of water into the pot. Put on the stove and set to High.


3. Lay the wax paper on top of your cutting board and put the chicken on it. Put another piece of wax paper on top. Now punch the fat part of the chicken until it flattens out a bit. You kinda just want the chicken to be uniform. Peel off the top layer and sprinkle the chicken with some salt & pepper.


4. Maybe the water is boiling now. Turn it to low, put the rice in with a hefty pinch of salt and small pat of butter. Cover and let it bubble very gently. Like, my oven goes "LOW-1-2-...9-HI", and it's perfect at about 1½. Set the clock to 18 minutes. Dinner will be ready when that reaches zero.


5. Cut up the broccoli or trim the ends off the green beans. Take one clove of the garlic off the head, peel off the skin, crush it with the heel of a shot glass (or a spoon, but shot glasses are pretty tough— they have to survive drunk people, after all), and put it into the casserole dish with your greens. Add one shot glass full of chicken broth or water. Sprinkle gently with a little bit of salt and then stick in the microwave. DO NOT TURN ON THE MICROWAVE YET.


6. Heat the frying pan to medium-high. (I have a cheap but well-loved cast-iron pan I bought for three bucks at a charity consignment store. Three minutes on HIGH, then down to medium, and it works great. Cast-iron pans require a lot of love and attention before you can cook with them, though, so if you don't have one, stick with what you've got.) Add enough olive oil to coat the bottom, then add the chicken (without the wax paper, but you can compost wax paper, so do that if your municipality allows) and leave alone for 3-4 minutes, turn over, leave alone for 3-4 minutes again. Take out the chicken and put on a plate.


7. While the chicken is cooking, fill one shot glass about half-full of balsamic vinegar (a little too high is okay). Add dijon mustard, about half as much as you did vinegar. Fill the other shot glass completely with your jam.


8. Check the rice time. Is it down to 8 minutes? Start the microwave on HIGH for 2 minutes.


9. When the microwave stops, stir the greens, cover it and start it on HIGH for another 2 minutes.


10. When the chicken is browned (this may happen before or after the greens; it's okay, the greens can wait before it's turned and restarted, just don't let the chicken burn.), take it out and put it on a plate. Take the white wine and splash it into the pan, enough so that there are no dry spots on the bottom. With the flat edge of the spatula (plastic if it's non-stick, metal if it's cast iron), now scrape the bits of chicken stuck to the bottom of the pan (yes, it'll be there even for "non stick" pans). Now, to this, mix in the balsamic vinegar, mustard, and jam. Stir until everything is well-mixed. If it's kinda syrupy, it's perfect, otherwise let it bubble for a minute or two and it'll get that way. Put the chicken in and let it sit for two minutes, spooning the sauce on top. Turn the chicken over and set it go for another two minutes, spooning more of the sauce from the pan on top.


11. Take the chicken out of the pan and put it on a plate. Turn off the heat. It's ready. Cut it in half and give one piece to each person. Spoon the extra sauce out of the pan and glaze the bird even more.


12. Take the greens out of the microwave. Your broccoli or green beans are ready.


13. Sometime in the next minute or so, the rice timer will go off. Turn off the heat, and move the pot somewhere cool. It's ready.


14. Eat.

The total cost per person of something like this is about $4, which is less than half what the boxed meals cost.

Your total waste is whatever the greens came in, the wax paper for the chicken (which ought to be compostable), and whatever the rice and other ingredients came in. Buying in bulk reduces that a lot, as does using recyclable materials like glass.

And it's delicious.