tuftears | Cooking Experiment: Chicken Spinach Rollups

All right, now this was the cooking experiment for the day. A friend had suggested chicken rollups, which I've never done before, but sounded like an intriguing concept. The ingredients sounded simple:

4 chicken breast halves
1 lb spinach
1/2 bottle marinara sauce
Parmesan cheese

I began by cutting the chicken breasts in half, then sprinkling garlic powder and some white pepper on each so they could marinade while I sautee'd the spinach. I added some more garlic to the spinach in the process, then put it into a bowl. I also forgot to start the rice while I was doing this - whoops.

I then put the chicken breasts on a cutting board, covered with some Saran wrap, and used the bottom of a frying pan to flatten 'em some. (not enough, as you will see)

I put spinach on top of each piece of chicken, then used a spoon to scoop out marinara sauce from the bottle and spatter it onto the spinach - I didn't want the spoon to actually touch the chicken and risk putting raw chicken bacteriae into the bottle. Then I shook parmesan cheese on top, and rolled this up, and lastly I spindled them with toothpicks.

This gave me about half the spinach remaining, so I just stuck that in and added some more marinara sauce on top of both the chicken rollups and the spinach, and shook on some more parmesan cheese. Then I put it into the toaster oven and baked for 40 minutes at 350 degrees.

Here's the mistake I made, as you can see by the cross section:

I didn't pound the chicken out enough, so it came out pretty thick and not as much of a roll as I wanted - more like a "chicken wrap", so to speak. Still tasted very good. I didn't need to add any salt, the marinara sauce had all that was needed.

In all, a mostly successful experiment, IMO!