Fear of chicken.

In 1999, my friend Brandon was riding the wave of low-carb diets. Unlike my neighbor, who was simply omitting the bun from her late-night bacon cheeseburgers, Brandon was doing things the right, safe way. I remember having a barbecue at my apartment, he arrived early with two lean, ground turkey patties, which he grilled proudly alongside my roommate's sausages. Another night, I remember visiting and having some beers at his place, he still had the sense to pull frozen chicken breasts from the freezer to thaw for meals the next day. Brandon is the first person I knew, who was my age, and buying bags of frozen chicken breasts. All others kept a stash of frozen tamales from Trader Joe's in their freezer, if anything. Most simply went to Del Taco late at night.

It took me a long time to get to the frozen chicken breast stage of my life. Working them into a recipe is simple enough, but requires more planning than what a lot of us could manage in those days. Additionally, uncooked chicken intimidates me. It's hard to look at a piece of raw chicken and not think salmonella. Many years passed where I wasn't eating meat at all.

I've come around and despite my problems with factory farming, I've been told too many times by too many people, my protein consumption is too low and that lean, white meat or fish would take care of that problem. I'm still paranoid when I cook chicken, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. I've even gone to a hardware store to buy a rubber mallet specifically for pounding chicken.

Here's something that is a little more elaborate than my usual stir fry or chicken tacos.

I was feeling inspired. Four breasts thawing in the fridge while an unplanned excursion brought me to Trader Joe's one night. So, I bought readymade pizza dough. What cheese is affordable and a good match for chicken and versatile enough to use in other things? Crumbled feta.

Here's what I did... I pound out the chicken between some plastic wrap and cook slowly in a skillet over medium heat. Season with salt and pepper. Reserve two cooked breasts for use in salads, quesadillas, maybe pasta... With the other two breasts, shred using two forks to make quick work of it. Use your hands instead if you want. Heat a little barbecue sauce (honestly, I just found some bottled stuff in the fridge and used that), toss the shredded chicken in to coat. It was kind of late so I let it cool a bit and threw it back in the fridge.

Following day, worked the pizza crust as I described elsewhere on this blog, spread the barbeque chicken mixture over the crust, added paper-thin slices of red onion, crumbled feta. Easy pizza.

In the next post I'll explain what I did with all the leftover onion and chicken.