Blackened Chicken, Spinach, Baked Potato

Tonight, I made blackened chicken breasts served over cooked spinach with a side of baked potatoes drizzled over with an oregano & dill yogurt sauce.

Tonight’s challenge, as dictated by my wife: use absolutely no oil.

Challenge #2: making use of pre-frozen chicken breasts.  I.e., blast-frozen slabs of chicken-ness so distant from a real, live bird that they may as well have come from another planet, certainly came from another side of the globe, and are sold in a big ass plastic bag but shit they’re buy-one-get-one-free so you might as well…

The dissimilarity of the chicken slabs to things I normally recognize as poultry had me worried they’d end up pretty dry. So, I brined the chicken breasts for about an afternoon.  Brining also = defrosting.  Two birds, one bucket of salty water.

Pressed with finding a way to get taste into chicken slabs, I thought, “blacken”.

The blackening rub:

• A boatload of black pepper corns
• some salt
• ground thyme
• just a little smoked paprika
• onion powder
• a little dried rosemary
• a bit of dried oregano
• - blend in coffee grinder -
  
• then, a big garlic clove
• a slice of a jarred, preserved roasted red pepper (they’re juicy, grilled-tasting, and kind of sweet)
• - blend more to make a paste -
  

So, I coated the chicken breasts/slabs with that blackening paste and stuck them in the fridge until the evening.

What for a vegetable?… I cooked a bunch of spinach in some liquid left over from cooking clams a while back.  Had I been allowed to use oil, I would have done some sauteing or another.  As it were, however, I started some minced garlic in the clam liquid with salt, pepper, and ground cayenne pepper.  Once boiling for a minute or so, I added the spinach and cooked it until it was, um, cooked.

I baked some potatoes. All I had were Yukon Golds.  No oils, no fats, no particular interest in boiled potatoes…  So, yogurt sauce.  One, let me say here in the first post that the secret to good potatoes as revealed by Jim Farmer is oregano.  (Jim Farmer is a real person, a friend from college, a Mormon from Oregon, an artist, who I lost touch with years ago.)  I’ve got my own little potted herb garden on my balcony.  And, as it were, I thought it was a good time to cut back my oregano; so, into the yogurt it went.  I’m also trying to use up my dill before the whole fucking thing goes to seed; so, in with a little bit of dill too.  Plus a little salt, less pepper, and a few hours to marry.

I started off the chicken in a smoking hot cast iron skillet.  Then, without ever turning it, I finished it under the broiler.  I served the blackened chicken right on top of the spinach, put the potatoes next to them and spooned over the yogurt sauce.

What I liked:

• The blackening paste was fantastic in it’s own right.
• The yogurt sauce made for a great baked potato topping.  Be it not me to knock sour cream.  But, yogurt is more calorie and cholesterol friendly.  You can think of it as an alternative or a type of sauce in it’s own right.

What I would change:

• I made the blackened chicken outrageously hot.  It was good (if you like that sort of peppery intensity).  But, after a few bites it overpowered everything else on the plate.  I’d use less blackening paste for polite company.
• Yukon Golds are only best baked when you’re so tired of home cooking that the novelty of a different texture in a baked potato seems like a positive change.  Other than that, save them for “wet” preparations, like mashed potatoes.  Russets are better baked.