Today I’m going to write about a simple chicken recipe that goes well with the white pasta we had the other day. Pesto chicken sounds fancy and hard to make, but our lazy man version, with fake “pesto” makes it much easier.

The main ingredients of a classic pesto are basil, garlic, olive oil and pine nuts. It was traditionally ground together into a paste using a mortar and pestle. That sounds like a lot of work. On tv, most chefs use a food processor. Since I don’t have a food processor, we’re going to cheat and use some dried pesto. While it doesn’t make a nice creamy pesto sauce that goes well on pasta, it works well for flavoring chicken.

Our secret ingredient today is freeze dried basil. I’ve found that dry basil also works, but freeze dried basil works a little better because it almost becomes like fresh pesto when the olive oil hits it.

The tools we need are:

• A bowl for mixing.
• A spoon.
• A frying pan.
• A cookie sheet or oven safe plate lined w/ foil (for easy cleanup).
• Clean hands.

The ingredients:

• Freeze dried basil.
• Minced garlic.
• Grated parmesan cheese.
• Olive oil.
• Salt and pepper.
• Chicken thighs with skin on.

The procedure:

First, add some freeze dried basil to the bowl, followed by the parmesan cheese and garlic. The ratio doesn’t matter that much, just whatever you feel will taste good. I usually add about a third or fourth as much garlic and cheese as I do basil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Then add just enough olive oil to hydrate the basil. Mix well. If it feels a little dry still, you can add a little more oil. But if you add too much oil, it gets a little too runny for this recipe.

Here comes the messy part. With our “pesto” finished, we need to stuff this good stuff into our chicken. Make a little pocket by peeling away some of the skin in the middle, then stuff a spoonful of our pesto in there. It looks something like this:

Then slather a bit of the sauce on the outside of the chicken. When we have all our chicken thighs ready, preheat the oven to about 350. Put a little olive oil into the frying pan, and heat it to high. Brown the outside of the chicken thighs and set them onto the cookie sheet or oven safe plate. By now it should smell incredible. Bake the chicken on high until it’s cooked through, by my count it’s about 35 minutes. In the end it should look something like this:

Enjoy!

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