What We Cook: Chicken Cordon Bleu ~ page 113

Our Cookbook Blog

Our Cookbook ~ What We Cook, is a compilation of every recipe we (Janice and Carissa) cook - recipes from our cookbook collections, our recipe boxes, and our heads! We set up this blog for friends and family who have our cookbook to let them see pictures we post of the recipes in the book, and also for us to note any corrections, revisions, or additions to What We Cook. We encourage people who are cooking our recipes to let us know how the recipes turn out and any suggestions they might want to make.

In addition, we will be sharing some of our new recipes (along with pictures) that are not in our cookbook. We hope you will help us out and test recipes and give us your comments.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Chicken Cordon Bleu ~ page 113

I actually made this recipe twice, to try an experiment with it. I fixed this special main dish for my sister's birthday lunch last week. The portions came out rather large, and several of us could not finish our serving! The recipe says to pound out the chicken breasts till they are 1/4-inch thick. I found this hard to do with my light weight mallet. Later, Carissa told me she takes her chicken breasts to her driveway and hits it with a cast iron skillet to flatten the chicken!

It is important with this dish, that you gather everything together and lay it all out before you start...even the toothpicks that will hold the roll of chicken, ham and cheese together. The reason is that you are handling the raw chicken breast quite a bit...so you want to have everything you need ready to go, or you will be washing your hands constantly. (Which I was, since I was taking a lot of pictures!)

You can see how huge my rolls became!

This is the breading station.

After cooking, just pull out the toothpicks before serving. The chicken will stay together on its own after cooked.

Now I am going to show you "take two" on how to flatten your chicken....I tried this the next day...

While still half frozen, slit each breast in half to make 2 thin slabs.

Put the split breast in a plastic baggie, then just press hard with a heavy pan--no need to even hit it, just the pressing on the thin chicken thins out any left over thick areas. (Well, actually, David was doing the pressing, so if it was me, I would probably have to hit it!)The chicken rolled up so much nicer with the ham and cheese when it was not so thick. And the whole roll was smaller and a better sized portion. Also, David wanted more of the Swiss cheese flavor, so the second time I made these, I laid a slice of Swiss over each portion for the last 5 minutes of the cooking time. And I also sliced the roll in thick slices to serve, as that seemed more attractive than just putting the big hunk on a plate.

On day 2 of this meal, I served the Chicken Cordon Blue slices (with the melted cheese on top) along with bowtie macaroni in a Swiss cheese sauce (to add to the Swiss cheese theme hubby liked), and the last of the leftover roasted asparagus and brussel sprouts we had the day before!