Pioneer Woman's Ranch Style Chicken

I have another new recipe for this week, but I was surfing through Pioneer Woman's site, trying not to drool on my keyboard, and I found her Ranch-Style Chicken. Amazingly enough, I had all the ingredients on hand (a minor miracle, since I usually only keep plain mustard around, but I had bought Dijon for the other new recipe). So I decided to try it, although combining the words Ranch and Chicken seemed like a bad omen, considering what had happened in the past.

Pioneer Woman's Ranch-Style Chicken

Original recipe here

Given that I wasn't sure how well I could pull off the recipe, I decided to cut it in half

3 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves
1/2 c. Dijon mustard
1/2 c. honey
1 1/2 T. lemon juice
1/2 lb. thick-cut bacon
1/8 c. canola oil
shredded cheddar

While the chicken was thawing (I had the individually flash-frozen chicken breasts) I mixed up the mustard, honey, and lemon juice to make the marinade. I forgot to add the spices from the original recipe (I forgot there were spices until the meat was almost done marinating)

It looks really gross here, but less than 30 seconds of whisking later....

At this point, I was highly skeptical. It smelled very mustardy, and I'm not a huge mustard fan. But I decided to see it through. So I pulled out the chicken breasts.

I didn't have any wax paper, so I put them in a gallon-sized zipper bag for the pounding process.

I have a tenderizing mallet, but a) it doesn't have a smooth side, and the little teeth were leaving dents in the bag, so it made me nervous, and b) no noticeable flattening was going on. So I pulled out the rolling pin.

The rolling pin worked much, much better. Within a minute, tops, the chicken pieces were of roughly equal thickness.

I trimmed the excess fat off the chicken and cut the larger pieces in half for quicker cooking and more thorough marinating. Then I added them to the marinade.

Put the lid on the bowl, shook it around to coat the pieces and put it in the fridge for an hour. Meanwhile, it was time for bacon:

I sliced the bacon in half to make it fit better on top of the chicken later on. While the chicken marinated, I cooked the bacon on my handy-dandy George Foreman grill (tied with the slow-cooker for my second-favorite appliance; first place, of course, goes to the food processor!).

I cooked the whole package, so I could use the leftover bacon for Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Biscuit Cups. When the chicken was done marinating, I heated up 1/8 cup of the bacon grease and 1/8 c. canola oil in a large skillet, and cooked the chicken on each side until it started to brown.

Then I put them on a baking sheet which I had lined with foil to make cleanup easier, and baked them for 10 minutes at 400 degrees.

Then I put bacon and shredded cheese on top and popped it back in the oven for another 5 minutes.

Conclusion: This was really yummy. Unlike our flop, and despite my forgetting the spices in the marinade, the chicken was very flavorful. The mustard flavor was pretty much gone; the chicken was moist and slightly sweet-tasting. I enjoyed the combination of flavors you get by eating the bacon bite-by-bite with the chicken; my husband chose to eat it separately, and was rather enthralled by the idea of cheesy bacon. The toddler tried a bite and didn't hate it, but was more interested in the leftover mashed potatoes we were eating along with the chicken (when I got up to get her more potatoes, she stole my plate and started eating my potatoes).