Happy Monday everyone! I'm so used to posting on Tuesdays, I had a brief panic moment when I realized, oh yeah- I'm posting on Mondays now. It's like day light savings time for blogging.
I'm always on the lookout for a great chicken dish and as I stocked up on whole chickens when Whole Foods put organic chickens on sale for $1.99 pound, cooking chicken fits into my mission to cook through the meat I have in my freezer. I'm not certain how I came across this recipe for Baked Mustard Lime Chicken from Elena's Pantry, but it seemed like a simple dish to try. The recipe calls for chicken breasts but I felt confident whole chicken pieces would work out just as well.
After gathering my ingredients, I started preparing the the marinade for the dish by juicing some limes. It ends up I did not have enough fresh limes for the 1/2 cup of juice needed for the recipe, so I supplemented with bottled lime juice. I added the juice to my food processor
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Next, I roughly chopped the cilantro and added it to the food processor. I followed the cilantro with the mustard, olive oil, chili powder and salt. I didn't have Celtic sea salt, but I did have some Real Salt Sea Salt, so I used that. I processed the marinade until it appeared everything was "well combined" as the recipe states.
I then cut up my whole chicken and placed the pieces in a glass baking dish.
And poured the marinade over the chicken. After I poured the marinate, I moved each piece of chicken around a bit to make sure they were fully covered by the marinate.
I covered the baking dish with plastic wrap and placed it in the refrigerator to marinate. I was making this after work, so I didn't have a long time to marinate the chicken, so I set a timer for 20 minutes: the shortest recommended marination time. About 10 minutes into the marination time, I pre-heated my oven to 350 degrees.
After 20 minutes in the refrigerator, I put the chicken into the oven. Because I was using chicken parts with bones instead of the boneless chicken breasts that the recipe calls for, I started by setting a timer for 40 minutes.
After 40 minutes the chicken was at about 140 degrees. I reset the timer for 10 minutes more. At the end of that 10 minutes, the chicken was at the recommend 165 degrees.
Here is my finished plated chicken.
And a different angle of the finished chicken.
Accessibility & Cost of Ingredients: You should be able to find everything you need for this recipe pretty inexpensively at your big box grocery store. I used a whole chicken which was cheaper than buying boneless and/or pre-cut chicken.
Preparation & Cooking Time: It took me 7 minutes to cut up my whole chicken. It then took me 17.5 minutes to prepare the marinade. I let the chicken marinate in the refrigerator for 20 minutes. Because I used chicken pieces with bones and not the boneless chicken breasts called for in the recipe, my cook time was 50 minutes. Of course if you used boneless chicken breasts as the recipe calls for you can subtract 7 minutes for cutting the The stated cook time in the recipe using boneless chicken breasts is 18-20 minutes.
Clean Up: I cleaned up my preparation mess while the chicken marinated. Once cooked, I pre-scrubbed the baking dish a bit before putting it in the dishwasher.
The Paleo Review: Thumbs Up! The words that came to mind when I tried this recipes were: tart & tasty. The flavor of the chicken improved over night. There was plenty of sauce for drizzling. I had some of the chicken the next day over green beans and I liked that the sauce went well with the green beans as well. The next time I make this I will marinate the chicken for at least an hour. If you use boneless chicken breasts as the recipe calls for and plan ahead for the marination time, this could be a good weeknight dinner.