Chicken Roll Up - Fail

Chris and I used to be really good about cooking a new dish at least once a week, but have slowly fallen into the pattern of eating what ever we can make quickly.  Normally that's just grilling some type of meat on our griddler and pairing it with a salad and mac & cheese.

I decided that I wanted to get back into trying out new recipes.  I'm really excited about cooking with our new pots and pans that we received off of our registry once we move into a house, but for now our old items will do.  I made the mistake of not looking up recipes before we went food shopping, so I pretty much just looked for a recipe that would include what we already had at home.  I decided to do a mix of these recipes from Simply Recipes:  Chicken with Goat Cheese and Arugula and Chicken Bacon Roulades.

Chicken with Goat Cheese and Arugula via Simply Recipes 

The ingredients were:

- 4 Chicken Breasts

- Fresh Spinach

- Turkey Bacon 

- Sharp Cheddar and Italian Blend Shredded Cheese

- Extra Virgin Olive Oil

- Pepper and Swamp Dust Seasoning

I started out pretty well, pounding out the chicken breast.  Well I take that back.  I realized we didn't have a meat tenderizer, so I ran out to Kroger to pick one up.  

I pounded away, waiting for the neighbors above or below to come knocking on our door to see what was so loud.  Thankfully, no visits from the neighbors so I moved on.  I cooked the bacon in the microwave for 2 minutes, then layered that, the spinach and cheese on the pieces of chicken.  I forgot to add the seasoning first, so I had to take it all off to season the chicken, then place it back on top.  I'm really loving this swamp dust seasoning that I picked up in New Orleans after a cooking class with the bees.

Everything looked great after the layering, but that's where I think everything went wrong.

I made one without spinach just in case Chris didn't like it

I could not get these suckers to roll up! Chris attempted to help by adding in the tooth picks while I held the chicken, but it just wasn't working.  I think my two big mistakes were that I didn't pound out the chicken thin enough, and that there was too much stuff to roll it up.  I tried breaking up the bacon and taking some of the ingredients out, but they still wouldn't roll.  Without the chicken completed rolled, I went ahead and threw it into the skillet with the oil.  I browned one side and figured that was about as good as it was going to get.

Trying to save dinner, I went ahead and took out the tooth picks and just baked the semi rolled up chicken in the oven.  I whipped up a quick side dish of pasta-roni and called it a day.  This was the best looking one out of the bunch.

Yeah, that is a far cry from the picture online, but at least I had a happy customer.

They actually tasted really good and I'm pretty sure I'll take another stab at the roll up another day.

Have you tried out any recipes that didn't turn out exactly right?