Yummy bacon-wrapped chicken bites

[served with roasted beets and sautéed vegetables]

Saturday is sorta my day to cook. By the time the weekend comes along Luiz avoids the kitchen, so either I cook something up or we get take out. Yesterday I stumbled upon the Salad-in-a-Jar cooking blog which had an appealing recipe for bacon-wrapped chicken bites with cream cheese and jalapeño peppers.

As the blog author points out: “Add bacon to anything and it will fly off the table.” That is certainly the case when it comes to Luiz. So I figured I had a winner.

I grabbed a shopping bag and hit the street. We’ve got a nice butcher shop with an extensive deli-like counter just a few blocks away. Luiz and I had modified the recipe a bit before I went shopping. Jalapeños can be hard to find so we switched them out for sun dried tomatoes and we decided to kick the cream cheese up a notch by adding some gorgonzola.

The little butcher shop had everything I needed, so I was back in the kitchen in less than 30 minutes.

After cleaning the chicken breast I cut it into slices and pounded them out with a mallet. Topping each pounded slice with the cheeses, tomatoes and a few drops of pimento, I wrapped each in bacon and secured with a tooth pick. Quick and easy.

Then I fried them in a very hot pan, adding some water and covering them for a few minutes. They were scrumptious.

Luiz enjoyed them very much but he had an additional recipe modification to try with the four remaining bites I had not yet fried. Never one to let good bacon fat go to waste, Luiz heated up the oven and sliced a potato crosswise into thick slices. Then on an oiled baking sheet he stacked each remaining bite atop its own potato grease sponge and put them in the oven for 40 minutes. Yum.

Did I mention that Luiz has the cholesterol numbers of a teenager? Lucky him.