Work With What You've Got

When you find a recipe that piques your interest, sometimes you have to take it and tweak it a little to (in the words of Tim Gunn) "make it work" with what you have in your pantry.  I stumbled across a recipe in an advertisement from Mrs Dash in my October issue of Food Network magazine that sounded like something that I wanted to try, so I ventured into the depths of my kitchen pantry to see what I had on hand.  A couple of the ingredients, the chicken breasts and the mozzarella balls, did require a quick trip to the grocery store.

Here are the ingredients according to Mrs Dash:
2 Tbsp Mrs Dash Tomato Basil Garlic Blend
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
8 cherry tomatoes, cut in quarters
4 low fat tiny mozzarella balls, cut in quarters
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 tsp red wine vinegar
cooking spray

Using what I had in my pantry, I substituted Mrs Dash for a Chop House Blend of spices from The Fresh Market, two chicken breasts instead of four (they were massively huge breasts...hahaha) and the only mozzarella balls that I could find at my grocery store were herb-marinated.

First thing you want to do is preheat your oven to 350 degrees and spray a baking dish with cooking spray.

Then toss your tomatoes with 1 Tbsp of your blend of spices...

Lightly flatten each breast to 1/4" thickness and place some tomatoes and four quarters of mozzarella balls on each chicken breast...

Then roll them up and secure them with a toothpick.  Place the breasts in your baking dish, drizzle with olive oil, vinegar and the remaining 1 Tbsp of spice blend...

Bake for 30 minutes, then remove from the oven and cover lightly with foil to let rest for 10 minutes.

Now pour a glass of Pinot, grab yourself some greens and call it a meal.  What do you think?  Is this something you can work with??

Mendi