Baked Caprese Chicken

Tim is going to turn me into a good cook.  

He likes variety (something my family wasn't too great at growing up).  And he has really good taste buds, so he can tell me how to spice things differently to make them taste better.  

When I made the Meal Plan for this week on Monday, I planned to have "Pan Chicken", aka throw chicken, veggies, and potatoes in a 9x13 and bake it in the oven, but with today being so warm (and my oven heats up the house terribly), and already having an 8x8 of leftover "Paulsen Potatoes", I decided just to make chicken and salad to go with the potatoes.  We usually like Lawry's Mesquite marinade (modified, of course), but I ran out of time to marinade anything, so I opened the fridge to see what kind of chicken I could make quickly.  And I came up with this:

Baked Caprese Chicken

Ingredients:
chicken breasts (cut into serving size)
2 Roma tomatoes
shredded mozzarella cheese
pesto
olive oil
bread crumbs
black pepper
garlic powder

Yep, I just happened to have all of this in the fridge.  The mozzarella, pesto, and Romas were all leftovers from different meals the last few weeks.  Here's what I did: 

• Preheat oven to 450℉.  Cover a baking pan with foil (it makes clean up easier! Tim taught me this!) and spray a cooking spray on the foil so the chicken won't stick.  
• On a paper plate, mix black pepper and garlic powder with the bread crumbs.  On another paper plate, pour some olive oil.  
• Use a meat pounder to pound the pieces of chicken to about 1/2 inch thick.  
• Flop each side of each piece of chicken first in the olive oil and then in the bread crumb mixture, and place on the cooking sheet.  
• Bake for 10 minutes.  
• Take chicken out of the oven and flip each piece of chicken over.  Spread each piece with some pesto, and top with slices of Roma tomatoes.  
• Bake for another 10 minutes.  
• Take chicken out of the oven again, and top each piece with some mozzarella cheese.  
• Bake for 5 minutes (or until cheese is melted).  

I used a spatula to slide each piece of chicken off the tray.

I served our chicken with Paulsen Potatoes, and salad (not shown, we like our salads in bowls).

Because even almost being married 2 years, I still feel like I am learning to cook, whenever I try something new, I ask Tim to "grade it".  Today he gave this a "pretty good".  He said it didn't need anything else, it just was hard to cut.  He then explained what he meant was that he likes "the stacks", meaningbites with chicken, pesto, tomato, and mozzarella in them, and he doesn't want to eat a bunch of fallen-off tomatoes at the end.  I consider this grade DEFINITELY SUCCESSFUL!!!