Quick & Easy Healthy Dinner Idea!

Happy New Year. Welcome back to my channel. I hope you all had a fabulous holiday season. We did here. We ate, we drank, we tried it all. But now, it is time to reign things back in. And for that, I wanted to show you a super simple dinner idea that's healthy, delicious, and so easy. The whole thing can be made in about 20 minutes. All right, let's do it. First, you wanna add a quarter cup of olive oil. To that, we're gonna add half of a squeezed lemon, half a teaspoon of dried oregano. You could also use dried basil, dried parsley if that's all you had, one garlic clove that you've minced, and some salt and pepper to taste. And then go ahead and whisk that all up until it's combined. Then I have two boneless, skinless chicken breasts here. And what I like to do is cut them in half vertically so to butterfly them. Keep your hand on the chicken breast and then just slice it in half like this with a sharp chef knife, making sure you're not cutting it all the way through. You just want it to lay flat like that. Then you can also take a piece of parchment paper and a meat mallet and just flatten them out a little bit. That will just help them cook evenly. Okay, now that our chicken's ready to go, we're gonna put it in our marinade here. And here is the secret, because we have lemon juice in this marinade, so you don't wanna let it sit in here for too long. I would say like 10 minutes tops. Otherwise, what will start to happen is the acid in the lemon juice will start to sort of like cook the chicken, almost like ceviche, and then it becomes super rubbery and it's not a good look. You're just gonna let this sit for 10 minutes, but that's okay, because that is all you need to get the other part of the meal ready. All right, next we're gonna prepare the little cucumber tomato salad that I like to serve in the middle of my Mediterranean platter. I have an English cucumber here that I've washed. I like the English cucumbers because that way you can leave the skin on. You're just getting more nutrients, more fiber, and the skin on the English cucumbers is just a little bit thinner than a regular cucumber. You're going to just cut off the ends, cut it down the middle. You're looking for about a cup of chopped cucumber, and then I just cut it in thirds like this, and then just give it a chop until you get really nice little cubes. I'm gonna put these in my bowl here, but I'm also gonna use cherry tomatoes. It's better to use a cherry tomato because you'll just get more flavor out of them. So I typically will just cut them like this, once down the middle and once in half, just so you're getting roughly the same size as the cucumber cubes, and we're gonna look for a cup of these. Then you wanna chop about two tablespoons worth of parsley, and the parsley just adds a really delicious, wonderful freshness to this salad. Then for our dressing, I'm gonna use two teaspoons of a red wine vinegar and a tablespoon of olive oil, and then you can season with salt and pepper. I like to use this fleur de sel salt with salads. I just think it's lighter than regular kosher salt, and you get that nice little crunch, which I think is good, and some freshly cracked pepper, and then you can just toss that up until everything is combined and set it aside. It is all downhill from here, I promise. So I'm using just a small grill pan here. I'm gonna place my chicken inside, and I do one at a time so I don't crowd the chicken, and that way I get a really nice sear. If you have a larger grill pan, you certainly can add two, but here in my little French kitchen, all of my things have to be small because I don't have a lot of storage. So I have a little grill pan. Then once it starts to get white and opaque around the edges, you can go ahead and flip it. Then here's the way I like to serve this. I usually take out a large oversized dinner plate. I think this is probably about 14 inches. Then I take a little bowl like this, put it in the center. The bowl is going to be where we're going to put our yummy little salad that we just made, our cucumbers and tomatoes. So you're gonna do all of this while your chicken is resting. In it goes. And make sure you pour everything in, the vinaigrette and everything. All right, now here's how this gets even easier. You're gonna take some store-bought hummus, whatever your favorite brand is, and you're gonna add it to the platter. Now, the nice thing about this is you can size this up or down, depending on how many people you're trying to feed. And then next to the hummus, you can add some of these marinated store-bought peppers. Again, all you have to do is open the jar. Then next to the peppers, you can add some store-bought tzatziki. I love this with the chicken. I think it's a really great combination. And if you can't buy tzatziki where you live, I have a recipe for it, and I will leave it for you in the description. Okay, so this is looking really yummy. We have all of our veggies here, our little salads. We just need our chicken. But before we do that, we're just gonna add a few of these kalamata olives all around. I like to use the pitted olives. It just makes it easier to eat. Okay, now for our chicken. Let me show you how to slice it. I like to slice it into long, thin strips, slightly on the bias. I just think it looks prettier that way, and will get you the best texture. Go ahead and add your chicken to our little platter here. Then this is how I like to serve this dinner. I bring the platter to the table. Everybody gets a dinner plate. You certainly could serve this with pita bread or for something lighter. I really like these quinoa and rice brown crackers. You can typically find them in your health food section of your grocery store. And then everybody can kind of pile on what they like best. So you could take a little bit of hummus, add some peppers, add a little piece of chicken, and a little dollop of tzatziki. And if you really wanted to go for broke, you could put a little olive on top. And then I usually eat the salad at the end for a refreshing palate cleanser. I hope you guys give this one a try. Let me know what you think, and I'll see you back here next time. Until then, bye.