The bathroom renovation is finished and it is looking just fantastic. Photos to come when I get properly settled back home. It is so nice to have a walk in shower and I have lots of lovely storage space in my new vanity. But the part of it I like the most are the plain white wall tiles. I went with some reasonably cheap matt white wall tiles and they look so much better than I expected them to. Not what I expected to love at all.
And I do like being home. It was lovely staying with Mum and Dad and having company on my early morning walks with my dogs. But I have become such a creature of habit and found it all a bit discombobulating. It was different to being on holiday because so much of what I needed to get done – like going to work – didn’t change. But I got all out of sorts and lots of things seemed to have slid. So I am now home and getting myself sorted again. I am starting to feel a bit more organised, particularly in regards this blog. I am back with known lighting for my photography and I am cooking just for me in my kitchen.
I still have a few recipes of my Mum’s to share but will space them out as I want to make sure you are getting recipes for one from me. Sharing recipes for one was the main reason I set up this blog and I feel like I need to get back to focusing on that a bit more.
To get us back on track, I wanted to share this very simple recipe for pesto and cheese stuffed chicken breast wrapped in prosciutto. This is the dish that created the leftover prosciutto I used for the tomato, mushroom and prosciutto on toast with goats cheese recipe I shared recently. If you are in to meal planning I definitely recommend including both of these in the one week to cut down on prosciutto wastage, which you most definitely don’t want.
What I particularly love about this recipe is how simple it is, yet how fancy it seems. I am not sure why but stir-fries never seem fancy to me, even though they can have lots of ingredients, but the moment you stuff something it takes everything up a notch. I have slightly adapted this recipe from this cheesy pesto stuffed proscuitto wrapped chicken by Courtney from Sweet C’s Designs. I have just cut back on some of the ingredients to lighten it all up. In particular I use a lot less pesto. And because I am only cooking one piece of chicken, I found the cook time could be reduced slightly.
The main flavour is the prosciutto with hints of oozy cheese and pesto. I used a sun-dried tomato pesto as I like that with cheese but it would probably work just as well with a basil pesto if you had that on hand. It is quite a salty dish because of the prosciutto so I didn’t add any additional seasoning.
This is not the quickest dish to cook that I have shared but it comes pretty close in terms of actual hands on activity. The preparation is only 5 minutes and then you pop this in the oven and leave it to do its thing while you can get with being healthy and making a nice side dish of steamed vegetables. Cause you know I didn’t eat this with potatoes (much). At only 330 calories it is a great meal for getting flavour while eating lightish.
- 150g of skinless, boneless chicken breast (I find a chicken breast is normally more than this so I cut mine to the right size - for this recipe I used a nice thick piece from the wider part of the breast)
- 1 tbs of sun-dried tomato pesto
- 35g of bocconcini, slice into slices a few millimetres thick
- 2 slices of proscuitto (about 25g in case your slices are a different size)
- Heat the oven to 180 celcius (about 350 fahrenheit)
- Cut the chicken breast in half horizontally making sure you don't cut it all the way through - keep a bit attached to work like a hinge. If you accidentally cut all the way through, it won't matter that much, you will just need to make sure the proscuitto wraps around well to hold it all in place.
- Open the chicken breast like a sandwich and smoother the inside of the chicken breast with pesto and top the pesto with the sliced bocconcini.
- Close the chicken breast and wrap the proscuitto around it . If you can, get the two ends of the proscuitto to meet under the chicken breast so that when you put it in an oven proof dish dish, it sits under the chicken breast and stays nicely wrapped.
- Put the chicken breast in a small oven proof dish and cook in the oven for about 25 minutes. The main thing is to make sure there is no pink left in the chicken.
- Take out of the oven and devour.
Mmm…cheese inside meat wrapped in fancy bacon is always good 🙂
You really can’t go wrong with cheese and fancy bacon can you!
what a delicious combination of flavours! Yum!
Thanks Giulia. There are some great classic flavour combinations that you can’t go wrong with.