Caprese-Stuffed Chicken and Rice Casserole

Good afternoon and welcome to the Good
Plate’s Kitchen.
Today we’re making Caprese Stuffed chicken
and rice casserole.
For that you’ll need chicken breast,
sun-dried tomatoes, roasted red pepper,
fresh mozzarella, fresh basil,
and chicken base.
And we’re going to be
cooking this in a cast
iron skillet and using a
square dot thermometer.
Okay, first thing you
see the chicken breasts
have been cut almost
in half with a little pocket.
And then we’re going to take the sun-dried
tomato.
And we’re going to spread the sun-dried
tomato nicely on each chicken breast.
This sun-dried tomato was actually made
for me by one of my neighbors.
It’s really amazing.
Got lots of garlic and lots of wonderful
sun-dried tomato.
Okay, so see?
Get them all nicely with lots of sun-dried
tomato.
On there we’re going to do all of those.
And the kind of the good thing about doing
it this way is that while we’re getting
the rest of the ingredients
together, the chicken
breasts are going to have
a little bit of marinating
time so they’ll have
a little extra flavor.
If you don’t have a
nice neighbor like I do,
of course, you can use regular sun-dried
tomatoes that have been marinated in olive
oil and just finely chop them up and
so they are about that kind of consistency.
Okay, let’s set these aside and get
started with the other things.
First thing we have here is a ball of
fresh mozzarella.
This is not the same thing as regular
mozzarella.
This is fresh mozzarella
and it comes in a little
container that has water in
it to keep it nice and moist.
Okay, we’re going to slice
this up and we’re going to
slice it up so that we have
enough sliced for the chicken.
And we’re going to put two pieces of
mozzarella in each chicken breast.
We have six breasts which is three so we
need six.
Okay, there we go.
Now next thing we’re going to put some
olive oil in the cast iron skillet that
we’re going to put rice in because we
don’t want the rice to stick.
Now just take the rice and put it out
nicely with your hand.
That’s about a cup or so of rice which
means we’ll need about two cups of liquid.
Next thing we’re going
to take the chicken,
see how nicely they’ve
been sitting there.
Okay, we’re going to
take them and we’re going
to start putting the
other stuffing in there.
And the first thing that’s going to go in
is the red pepper.
These are sweet bell peppers.
They’re not spicy at all.
You can get spicy red peppers but we want
these to be nice and mild.
So we’re going to take each one and we’re
going to put the red pepper on each one.
There we go.
Oh, there’s one more.
We’re going to put it on the last one.
Push them out.
There we go.
That’s the last.
Okay, next is the cheese that we sliced
earlier.
So one, two, one, two, one, two.
That third one’s for me.
Yum, yum, yum.
Next is the fresh basil.
This is basil that actually came out of my
garden.
So we’re going to take this little leafed
basil and put it on each piece of cheese.
The fresh basil is so wonderful and really
easy to grow.
So it’ll grow in your
and your counter in your
kitchen so you can have
fresh basil any time you want.
There we go.
That’s that.
And now we’re going to close them up.
There you go.
And we’re going to use toothpicks to keep
them together so they don’t fall apart.
Of course, when you use
toothpicks, you know, please be
careful to take the toothpicks
out when you serve the food.
Nothing worse than somebody getting a
toothpick stuck in their mouth.
It’s very painful.
Not a good thing to do.
Okay, we have one more.
Actually, we have two more.
But in that one, but okay,
now we can set these aside
and we’re going to get
the rice ready at this point.
Now, next thing we’re going to do is we’re
going to make the broth for the rice.
This is chicken base, which I’m adding to
hot water.
And chicken base is wonderful.
You just have to make
sure that it’s really,
really well stirred
in there so it doesn’t.
There isn’t left over chicken base on the
bottom.
I usually stir it with a spoon.
And then I have a very small whisk that I
get the rest of it with.
We’ll see that in a second.
I’m going to pick it up and use it.
There we go, a little tiny whisk.
And that’s that.
That’s all nicely mixed together.
And now we’re going to take that.
And here’s our rice.
And we put it in the pan earlier and now
we’re going to take the liquid,
the broth, and put it over that.
Of course, if you have your own chicken
broth in your refrigerator that you’ve
previously made, please, please, please,
you’re more than welcome to use that.
That would be an air one to look how
pretty that is.
And here goes the third one and we’re
adding the rest of the broth in there.
Completely cover the rice.
And then we’re going
to sprinkle some freshly
cracked black pepper
on top for flavor.
And the last thing
we’re going to do, we’re
going to add these are
whole brussels sprouts.
If you want to, you can cut them in half.
We cut them whole.
If you have really big ones, then yes,
absolutely cut them in half.
These were relatively small, so we just
kept them whole.
If you don’t like brussels
sprouts. Of course,
you are more than
welcome to omit them.
Or if you really like them, you can add
more.
Because they’re going to be baked.
And the amount of time
that they’re going to be baked,
they’ll get nice and soft
and really, really wonderful.
And they’ll have all that lovely chicken
caprice flavor in them.
Okay. Now, next thing
we’re going to do is
we’re going to make
sure that the chicken cooks
correctly.
And as you know, chicken that is underdone
is rather dangerous.
So we’re going to use
a probe thermometer.
This is a probe
thermometer from square dot.
From Thermo Works.
It’s called a Square Dot.
And it’s great because you can put the
probe in and then set the temperature.
We’re going to set the temperature for
160.
And that way, there’s an alarm that goes
off.
When it gets the correct temperature,
as you can see right now, the inside of
that chicken is 46 degrees
Fahrenheit.
We’re taking it up to 160.
Oh, it’s 161. 160.
There you go. Okay.
Now, that goes in the front of the stove.
And the stove has been set for 350
degrees.
And we’re going to cook it for 90 minutes.
And there it is out of the oven.
Here it is on our plate.
It is so delicious.
You would not believe.
Okay.
See you next time.
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Bye bye.