Hummus-crusted chicken

I again offer my sincerest apologies for my absence this past week. Once again my B was out of town (Dallas this time), and let's face it - when he's not here, I don't cook. Instead, I get takeout from Taco Casa and spend my free time reading with a glass of wine and a snuggly dog instead of cooking and cleaning up. But I digress.

Anyway, to today's recipe. So on Friday, my coworker asked me for a recipe that was reasonably healthy with fresh ingredients and was relatively easy. After perusing my Pinterest "Food Win" board, I landed on this hummus chicken. She texted me on Friday night after she made it, saying that she loved it. And I figured if she loved it then surely you nice people out in Internet-land would, too.

It feels almost criminal to list this as a recipe because it's so ridiculously easy and there is very little work to it. However, I think that's one of its great strengths as a recipe. I like to cook, but I'm a practical chef - if it has 85 ingredients and takes an hour and a half to prep for, then I am decidedly NOT making it. This is my kind of recipe - delicious but easy. As an added bonus, it reheats well, which is always a consideration since I try to always make food that yield leftovers for lunch.

Anyway, the recipe goes a little like this: you put chicken breasts in a pan, put hummus on top of it, and bake at 450 degrees for 25 minutes. That's it. THAT'S IT!

The original recipe called for baking the hummus chicken on top of a bed of zucchini, squash and onion, but we found that the vegetables just didn't achieve optimum flavor or done-ness that way. This time we roasted Brussels sprouts and heirloom cherry tomatoes with mushroom sage olive oil from Palmetto Olive Oil Company, and they were DIVINE. Definitely bake the chicken separately from the veggies, and don't feel limited to squash and onions - you can roast almost any veggie you like.

**One little tip, though - you don't need an entire container of hummus for this recipe, so be careful NOT to contaminate the rest of the container with the knife after you've spread it on one piece of chicken. Basically, don't double-dip. We did that the first time, and wound up throwing out a nearly full container of hummus because someone (ahem, me) is terrified of food-borne illness. This time, we took a spoon and scooped some hummus into a bowl. We then used the hummus in the bowl to spread on the chicken.

You can check out the original recipe here, or, as usual, see it with my revisions and commentary below.

Hummus-Crusted Chicken

Ingredients:
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
Salt and pepper
1 cup hummus (Any flavor! The first time we used original, but tonight we used the zesty spice and garlic pictured above - definitely delicious)
1 lemon
1 teaspoon smoked paprika (we used cayenne pepper)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Grease a baking dish with olive oil spray or cooking spray.
Place the chicken in the dish and cover each breast with hummus.
Squeeze fresh lemon juice over the chicken and hummus to taste.
Sprinkle with paprika, or cayenne, or whatever you have on hand.
Bake for 25 minutes.
Serve with roasted vegetables of your choice, and enjoy!