As I was deciding what meal I wanted to make that incorporated chicken, I wanted to stay away from just baking a chicken breast and cooking green beans as a side. I wanted to have some variety and a recipe that had more than one ingredient. For me, chicken is very easy to make plain, but I wanted to be able to add to my list of recipes. The thing I love about chicken is that there is such a variety of things you can do with chicken. A recipe that I kept going back to was chicken fajitas. My fiancé and I absolutely love fajitas and would always choose to make them over tacos with beef or steak.
I found the recipe when I was searching on Pinterest. I saved the recipe on my Food and Recipes page. I like saving recipes there because it becomes a digital recipe book I can access anywhere. The site that the recipe came from is Spend With Pennies, which is already on my list of cooking blogs that I like. It felt like fate.
The first step was buying all the ingredients. I didn’t have some of the spices at home, so that was an extra cost, but with most spices, they last a long time and now I have them to use for future meals. These are the ingredients from the original recipe:
The ingredients were very easy to find. I found all of the spices in the spice section at my grocery store. I didn’t see any that said smoked paprika, but I just bought original paprika. I bought a red, yellow and green pepper. It doesn’t matter what kind of pepper you get, but I don’t like orange peppers (this could all be in my head, but I think orange peppers are too sweet).
Next, I cut up the onion. I cut the onion down the middle, cut off the ends, peeled the onion, cut the onion horizontally into 1/4 inch slices.
I then cut up the peppers. My fiancé taught me a trick to cut peppers with all those pesky seeds. First cut off the top and pull it out. Then hit the bottom side of the pepper upside down so all the seeds fall out. It only takes about three or four hits to knock of most, if not all, the seeds. Once the seeds are out, cut the pepper in 1/4 pieces. From there, cut the pepper into less than 1/2 inch vertical slices.
I then added my dry ingredients (1 teaspoon of chili powder, 1/2 teaspoon of paprika, 1/2 teaspoon cumin, 1/2 teaspoon onion powder, 1/2 teaspoon of black pepper) and 1 tablespoon of olive oil into a medium bowl. I then squeezed half a lime into the bowl and mixed the ingredients. (The recipe calls for salt for taste. I didn’t add any salt to my fajitas. Next time I will add a little salt to the mix). Then I cut up my chicken breast into horizontal 1 inch thick strips. Once the chicken was all cut up, I put them into the bowl and mixed them into the spice mixture. The chicken soaks up all the liquid, so you shouldn’t have any left at the bottom of the bowl.
Then I preheated my pan with 1 tablespoon of olive oil to coat the pan. I had the stove on medium high heat. Once the pan was hot enough, I cooked half of the chicken at a time. I cooked the chicken until it was fully cooked (no pink at all). It took about five minutes to cook half the chicken. I then took the cooked pieces out, and cooked the other half for five minutes. I had to turn it lower than medium because our stove gets too hot. You have to be careful with chicken because it can easily burn on the outside and not be fully cooked on the inside. It’s better to cook at lower temps longer, to make sure your chicken is fully cooked. I always cut into a thicker piece to be sure. (Yes, my pan is warped.. No, I have no idea what happened to it. OOPS)
Once the chicken is all cooked, remove it to a plate, and then add another tablespoon of olive oil to your pan. I put in my onions and cooked them for about five minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure both sides are cooking (the original recipe says 2 minutes, but that didn’t seem long enough when I was cooking them). I then added my peppers and cooked them for about three minutes, again stirring and flipping them to make sure they all were being cooked.
Once the peppers were hot, I added my chicken back into the pan and stirred it all together. Once the chicken is back in, you can turn the stove off, but leave it on the stove to keep the heat when you serve it.
I then served them on flour tortillas. I put my tortillas in the microwave with a damp paper towel over them for 45 seconds to warm them up and soften them a little bit. They are now ready to enjoy. I like my fajitas plain, but my fiancé likes to add shredded cheese and sour cream to his. You can add your favorite toppings. I hope you enjoy the easy to make chicken fajitas. Bon Appetit!
