Recipe: Easy Garlic Chicken

The other day when I locked myself out of my house after a run, I was hanging out at my friend Linda’s house when she pulled some leftovers out of the fridge for lunch. We ended up eating something her German foreign exchange student Monia had made, but a whiff of another option, a garlicky chicken dish, captivated me.

“It’s a Pinterest recipe that I tried for dinner the other night,” she said.

I repinned it to my own Pinterest pages and decided to try it for dinner on Saturday.

It’s called Easy Garlic Chicken, and besides the garlic, its use of brown sugar as a glaze ingredient intrigued me. I love salty/sweet combinations, especially when they include garlic.

Since I needed to carb up for a long run the next day, I decided to serve the Easy Garlic Chicken with some leftover linguine pasta that I had frozen from an earlier meal. I also decided to add some sautéed mushrooms, since I think mushrooms make most things better, especially pasta. Add a green salad and you’re good to go.

Below is the recipe for Easy Garlic Chicken, with my modifications in italics:

Ingredients:

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (I only used two, since only two of us were eating and I was serving the chicken with pasta)

4 garlic cloves, minced (I used about 6 because I LOVE garlic!)

4 tablespoons brown sugar

3 teaspoons olive oil

I also added about ½ to ¾ of a cup of sliced mushrooms

Directions:

Preheat oven to 500°F and lightly grease a casserole dish. (I used a toaster oven, and only heated it to 400)

In small sauté pan, sauté garlic with the oil until tender. (I sautéed my shrooms first, then added the garlic to the pan)

Remove from heat and stir in brown sugar.

Place chicken breasts in a prepared baking dish and cover with the garlic and brown sugar mixture.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Bake uncovered for 15-30 minutes. (That’s a pretty broad range, in my opinion. I checked mine at 15 minutes, with a meat thermometer, and let it cook 5 more minutes, then rest for five.)

Review:

I liked it (and my significant other didn’t complain). The sweetness worked well with the garlic, which had a toasty, nutty taste. If I use mushrooms again (and who am I kidding – of COURSE I will!), I won’t slice them as thin. Between the sautéing and the baking, they lost a lot of their texture. Thicker slices would have held up better, or I could have used the thinner sliced shrooms just under the glaze without the separate sautéing step.

But I think I diluted its impact by trying to stretch the glaze into a sort of sauce for the pasta. It might have had more WOW! If I’d just tossed the pasta with some olive oil and parmesan, and kept all of the glaze with the chicken. It would also work well with potatoes or rice.