Chicken Breast Baked in a Bag with Mushrooms, Butter, White Wine and Thyme & The World's Best Baked Onions

Chicken Breast Baked in a Bag with Mushrooms, Butter, White          Wine and Thyme & The World's Best Baked Onions

As I have mentioned many times before, my wife is an extremely picky eater and when it comes to which parts of the chicken she'll eat, it comes down to the breasts (haha!). She will only eat thin cut chicken breasts. I tend to find the light meat to be way too dry for me, so I prefer dark meat, and usually go for thighs. I originally planned on using a thin chicken breast for my wife and a thigh for myself, but had forgotten to take the thigh out of the freezer in time, and so I ended up just throwing in four thin chicken breasts. Big mistake on my part.

I am going to be completely honest. This was not my favorite dish. Although everything sounded amazing --chicken, mushrooms, garlic, wine, and butter, all of my favorite things, the reality of it was not so. Jamie instructed that I use one large glass of white wine in this recipe. Now when I cook with wine, I tend to use Pinot Grigio. Mainly because I refuse to drink it. One large wine glass though, is a lot of wine. Especially for a type of wine I'm not particularly fond of. In the end, the mushrooms looked delicious, but all I could taste was the tart Pinot Grigio-ness of the wine. In the end, I wound up chucking more butter and salt in with them and I was then able to eat it.

Something about cooking in a bag of foil. I'm pretty sure Jamie Oliver taught me this amazing trick many years ago, when I first started buying his cookbooks. It was also a trick I learned in culinary school -- although I think that was mainly with fish. 

Chicken baked in foil bag with mushrooms

This onion dish called for sweet white onions, pancetta/bacon, garlic & thyme. I couldn't find whole slices of pancetta that didn't rob me blind, so I wound up using Black Forrest Uncured bacon I found at Trader Joes. 

The whole thing was extremely easy. Boil onions for about 10 minutes, until tender. Scoop out innards of onions and sauté them with garlic, butter and thyme. Once the kitchen smells amazing, pour in some heavy cream and Parmesan cheese. This ends up being a completely decadent creamy sauce that you then pour on top of the onions. And in my option (and that of my wife's), was the best part of the entire meal. You then bake them all together.

I wound up eating pieces of the onion, chicken and mushroom all together.  I don't know if you've ever done it, but  its hard to just devour an entire onion. Even though it is baked and has a pieces of bacon wrapped around it, in the end, it is just an onion.  My wife wound up mixing everything together -- the chicken dish, baked onions, bacon and some leftover rice from night before -- and made it into some sort of chicken/mushroom/onions/bacon gumbo. In the end, she had 3 helpings and said it was absolutely delicious. 

Baked onions wrapped in bacon