Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Bacon Wrapped, Cream Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post. The original recipe by Chef #844314 can be found over at Food.com

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was Nance’s choice, and I was like “We’re gonna stuff a chicken breast with what and then wrap it with what? Um, okay.”

“You two is some crazy, crazy bitches.”

At least the ingredient list was pretty short and simple. One of the things required was two pieces of partially cooked bacon for each chicken breast. Instead of frying up that bacon in a pan, I opted to keep the mess contained to the oven (note to self: clean the damn oven). I baked the bacon in the oven at 450ºF for 8 minutes. It was fairly thin bacon, so if you use thicker bacon, you’ll want to bake it longer.

Now please gaze upon the rest of the ingredients:

Boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cream cheese, and green onions. Pretty simple, right? Guess who has a back forty FILLED with chickens but still had to buy chicken breasts at the damn grocery store? I know, completely ridiculous.

My main gripe about buying chicken breasts from the grocery store is that they are SO FREAKIN’ HUGE. I mean, look at those monsters. Those damn things are just pumped full of  hormones, I guarantee it. (I should have bought the organic, pastured-raised chicken breasts, but… I didn’t. Because HO BOY is that shit expensive.)

First step: pound the chicken breasts ’til they’re about 1/4″ thick. I put my chicken breasts in a Ziploc® bag, zipped it mostly closed, and then beat the hell out of that thing with a rolling pin ’til it was flattened enough.

See? No chicken goop everywhere. The chicken goop is contained, there’s no salmonella running rampant over my counters, all is good.

“Why you beat the chicken? Was it bein’ bad?”

Mix 2 T cream cheese and 1 T chopped green onions for each chicken breast, then spread it across the chicken breast as you can.

Then you’ve got to roll up your damn chicken breasts. I will confess to you that I didn’t so much carefully roll up each breast as KIND OF roll each breast up and then tucked in the ends.

Then I wrapped two pieces of bacon around each chicken breast and tucked the ends under, putting each piece of chicken on a baking sheet afterward. I did not, as was instructed by the original recipe, secure the bacon with a toothpick. I just figured tucking the bacon under would be good enough.

Then while the chicken baked, I went upstairs for some kitten therapy. This pounding and rolling and wrapping bacon thing is STRESSFUL.

The best kind of stress reliever.

The chicken cooked for 30 minutes, and then sat under the broiler for another 5 minutes to make the bacon crispy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the cream cheese did not, in fact, melt out of the rolled-up chicken breasts and go all over the place.

The verdict? Well, Fred said it was good and he’d never request it, but he’d eat it if it was put in front of him and wouldn’t complain.

The first bite I took, I thought “Hey, this is pretty good.” That lasted until about 1/3 of the way through the piece of chicken, and then it was suddenly gross. I didn’t really care for the cream cheese and green onion stuffing, I guess. Something about that, combined with the chicken was not appealing. I think that if it had been stuffed with something different it would have been good, but the way it was… ugh. No. I won’t be making it again.

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Nance’s take:

This is a picture of Felina Marie and Sadie Mae. AKA: The most hopeful dogs in the world. They love trying new DCEP recipes, but they have been put on a grain-free diet so our last few recipes have just made them sad.  If you look closely at Felina (especially the eye to your right), you can see why I call her a googley-eyed ugly dog.  Marty Feldman doesn’t have shit on her!

This is a picture of me. Shirley has a new camera and I was being a smart-ass, showing her how to take selfies and what you do if you’re a fat chick that wants to look thin (hold the camera up in the air and aim down).   While I was making this chicken.  Except I guess I don’t know how to do it right because I lost an eye. The reason I included these two pictures is so you can see that there was some messed up shit going on in this house.  Poor deprived dogs.  And a dummy that can’t fit her huge goddamn face into a camera frame.  Things are not looking good around here.  Not at all.  And we won’t even mention how it looks like I broke my nose as a child.  Or the fact that my real mother’s name was probably Barbra.  Barbra Streisand.

This was supposed to be our dinner Friday night.  Rick brought the chicken up from the freezer the night before and it thawed in the refrigerator over night.  I could have shit when I got a good look at it. Freezer burn. What the fuck.

This was the only piece of meat that wasn’t entirely ruined (although we did have to cut a bit of it off).  We put our meats, etc., in name-brand freezer bags in order to not waste food. This was an issue for a while now, but I had been on the fence about buying one of those fancypants FoodSaver™ (damn right that’s an affiliate link) things because of the cost of the bags.

You know what else is expensive?  Meat (and any other food) that you’re throwing away.  So yeah, I’m using my FoodSaver™ exclusively now.  Those name-brand bags can be used in the canister that I keep by my sink for food scraps.  Please note the pro-tip:  God forbid, you might have to walk 3 feet to the garbage can with potato peels in your hands!

Okay, okay.  I’ll get back to the topic at hand which is the making of this god-forsaken recipe that I picked and how I regretted it from the minute I actually took five seconds to read it.  I have got to STOP just glancing at the recipes that I pick for this site!  I honestly saw the pretty picture with the words bacon and chicken, figured that would make the family happy and went with it.

I had no green onions and there was a brouhaha in this house over whether or not chives are nothing more than dried green onions. It seems that Rick’s grandfather (who is a saint) told him this and homeboy was not backing down from that argument…even when google gave me ALL OF THE INTERNET to prove that he was wrong!

Them fools be fightin’ over chives and shit.

I still went with chives because there was no way I was running back into town for green onions in order to make ONE slightly freezer burned chicken breast with cream cheese and bacon.

You beat the meat, slather the cream cheese mixed with green onions (or chives, nobody really gives a shit) all over it, roll it up in partially cooked bacon and bake the hell out of it.  And then when you’re done baking the hell out of it, you’re supposed to turn on your broiler and burn your damn bacon until it’s ash.  Voila!

Rick and my mom tried it because they’re game for eating anything. Rick said it tasted like baked cream cheese.  It was not a winner with him even with bacon.  My mom liked it, but hey, she’s older and you know those taste buds are shot to shit.

This recipe was fairly simple to make, but so is a toasted cheese sandwich…stick with making one of those and you’ll be better off.  And yes, the dogs did get some of the freezer burned meat after we cooked it for them.  They didn’t mind it all.  Go figure. 

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