Margherita Chicken | RV Cooking & Healthy RV Recipes #5

What's up, guys? Thanks for joining this week. Irene Iron Fitness. I have a recipe for you, margarita chicken. If you want a healthy twist on an old classic, keep watching. Everything's prepped. Let's get some cooking started. I'm going to start with my eggplant. I'm going to do fried eggplant, lightly, so it's healthy. The eggplant is done pretty quick. The side is going to go great with this. I'm just going to get this on my serving plate. We're going to get onto the margarita sauce. Our pan is smoking, smoking hot. Turn it down a little bit. Get some oil in there. I'm going to quick throw the onions in. Onions will take a few minutes. We're going to put a little salt and pepper on the onions, seasoning each layer as we go. Once these sweat out a little bit, get translucent, then we're going to add in the garlic for a minute. Then we're going to add in our San Marzano tomatoes. San Marzano tomatoes are the most famous plum tomato out of Italy. They are grown in volcanic soil. They have a little sweeter taste. They're lower in acidity. They're easier to peel. They have less seeds. They're a little superior to other canned tomatoes. If you can get them, you should. If you can't, don't worry about it. Just get some regular diced tomatoes. That'll do the trick. If you can find a good price on it, then it's worth the extra buck. We're going to add the garlic in. The garlic only takes a minute. Careful not to burn the onions or the garlic. Then we're going to add in the tomatoes. When we got these ready, if you recall, we strained these apart from the juice that it comes in. I did save the juice in case we need it, but I'm just going to start with the tomatoes that we crushed. The juice that you see here in this can is actually from within the tomatoes, the actual tomato juice, not just the juice that was added to the can. We'll put this in. We're going to let this simmer. I'm going to add a touch more salt and pepper for the tomatoes to get seasoned. I'm going to throw in some basil to flavor the sauce. I'm just going to take a whole entire thing and throw it in. Stem and everything. By leaving it connected like this, it's going to make it really easy for us to pull it out and discard it after the sauce is made. If it's not juicy enough, you can add in some of your reserves. If you're using diced tomatoes instead of the San Marzanos, you'll probably just want to put the entire can of diced tomatoes in, and with the San Marzanos, see how it goes. I'm going to hold off on this, and we'll see if we need it. We have our sauce simmering, and we're going to do our chicken now. We're going to saute the chicken breasts. Normally, I would have done the chicken breast step after the eggplant, before starting the sauce, but I was so excited, I totally forgot, and I jumped into the sauce, but that's okay. We're going to do it on a different pan while the sauce is simmering. This is a 12-inch skillet, and it's getting hot. Add a touch of oil, and our chicken breasts can go in. Those fit perfectly. The reason we cut these in half was just to make them more manageable when they're in a package from the store. They're often quite large, so slicing them in half makes them quick cooking, plus it makes them more appropriate for a single serving size. We're going to sear the chicken on the first side. It's probably going to take three, four minutes. Flip it, sear it on the other side. Once that's done, I'll meet you back to put the cheese on. Next step, while the chicken is cooking and the sauce is simmering, we're going to get our cheese sliced so that it's ready to put on top of the chicken breast. Get fresh mozzarella, if you're able to. I keep this in the refrigerator while everything else is cooking just to keep it cold. It's a little soft and fragile, so I want to keep it in there until I'm at this point where it's ready to use. What I like to do is keep in mind the shape of your breasts, and try to make your pieces to fit each breast, or if that's not an option, you can just break it up. I try to do half of an ounce per serving so that it's not overwhelmed with cheese. You can do the amount that you like. If you are avoiding dairy altogether, just weave it off, and the sauce and the chicken on its own is going to have so much flavor, you won't even miss it. Our chicken is browned. Do this quick. Get this back on the heat. Check in on my sauce. This is looking really good, and it smells so good from that fresh basil. You could definitely use dried basil if that's what you have, or if that's in your budget. I love to keep dried herbs on the van here. It's pretty rare where I'm buying fresh herbs. If I have a specific recipe for it that I know that I'm going to use it for, I'll absolutely make a point to go buy fresh. But the majority of my meals are all cooked using dried, and it's great. Okay, so next what we're going to do is we're going to fish out this. Make sure there's no other basil stems in there. It looks really nice. Can you see the consistency here? It's starting to thicken up. I had it pulled off the heat for a little bit, but this pan really holds it in. Even when it was pulled aside, it was still simmering down a little bit. We're going to put these chicken into your sauce. Okay, it's time to do the toppings. We're going to do the basil first. Just lay a couple of leaves on each serving of chicken. These are nice and vibrant because they haven't been cooked at all. Then next, the mozzarella. We are going to do half an ounce for each piece of chicken. The amount that you use is your preference. We were actually inspired in New York City by all of the pizza shops and all of the margarita pizza that we saw while we were out and about. One thing that's great to do if you're trying to eat healthy and you're trying to avoid those foods that you pass that just look and smell amazing is recreate it on your own in a healthy version. The cheese is on. Get your lid and pop it over. We're just going to let that melt down for a couple of minutes. The cheese is melted. We're ready to serve it up. Take a look at that. Ooey gooey deliciousness. My eggplant. You could serve this with anything, really. Any vegetables. You could do it with pasta. You could do it with rice. Let's get your chicken on here. And you can spoon some of that sauce on top. And there you have it. I can't wait to dig in. Looks good. If you'd like to see more content, please like and subscribe. And comment down below if there's something that you'd like to see me make or a healthy version of something. And you can go to my website, IreneIronFitness.com, for the principal recipe. We'll see you next week.