Though this recipe takes rather more preparation than my last one, it can still be made without too much fuss, and the results are excellent. My fiancée and I made this for my family today, and everyone loved it. This is the first time I'd cooked avocados for so long, and I wasn't sure how they'd respond, but they retained all their color and only got a little softer. As with most recipes, you should feel free to change things to suit your own taste, though I would request that you leave in the bit about serving the chicken after it's been cooked.
Ingredients for 6
Method
Prepare the avocados and cheese now, because your grip on the knife will be fairly tenuous once your hands are covered in raw chicken. Cut each avocado in half the long way and pop the pits out (this becomes much easier if you chop the knife into the pit and twist). If the avocado is properly ripe you should be able to pull the skin off with your fingers, otherwise go get a new one. I'll wait here. Once you have four lovely green halves, eat one and slice the remaining three into fourths the long way, giving you twelve slices total. Put these someplace where you won't be tempted to eat them. Slice the cheese into six chunks the size of your thumb, or the size of my thumb if yours is weird.
Trim the chicken breasts, if necessary, and beat each with a meat mallet until it flattens out. You can substitute a heavy glass for the meat mallet in an emergency, and you can use plastic wrap to avoid covering your kitchen in chicken splatter. Take one tablespoon of butter and rub a little on the inside of each breast. Top each with a piece of cheese sandwiched between two avocado slices and roll tightly.
Nestle the rolls in a baking pan and
drizzle with the remaining three tablespoons of butter, melted of course. Sprinkle generously with
salt, coarse
black pepper, and chopped herbs, followed by all the bread crumbs. Consider adding more crumbs. Bake at 350 °F for 40-50 minutes, or until you can cut through to the filling without finding any pink. Some of the cheese will have melted out and been browned where it touched the pan. This is a
Good Thing, so don't leave it behind when serving. The buttery, chickeny, rosemary-y juice in the pan is excellent on
mashed potatoes, but that is left as an
exercise for the reader.
The Debutante says: I couldn't possibly eat this, but if you want to incorporate bacon, how about wrapping each chicken breast with it?
/me says: To do this, leave out the butter and crumbs and put the herbs/pepper on the inside, since they won't stick to the outside very well without the butter. Secure the bacon at the ends with toothpicks. You might have to turn it over partway through cooking to make sure the bacon cooks properly, but I'm not sure about that. It should be really good though.
shaogo says: Two things: wheat bread may impart a nutty flavor that can be avoided by using the Japanese "panko" bread crumbs, available in Asian markets. As for the bacon, I'd prepare the chicken rolled with only the cheese and bacon, and then slice the stuffed, cooked breasts so I can set the avocado and tomato, cool or room-temp, atop the breasts and then sauce 'em...
/me says: We tried making this again, but wrapped in bacon instead of coated with crumbs. It tasted really good, but was a little too greasy and the bacon wasn't uniformly crispy. I would recommend using the original recipe and just cooking the bacon for breakfast the next day.