Pesto Chicken

This was sooo easy and the pesto made it seem like such a fancy dish. My husband loved it!

The recipe originally came from Allrecipes.com, but I’ve changed some things:

Ingredients:
• 6-8 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (I like them fairly thin for this recipe and I buy them locally, where I know the chickens are given no hormones, and they’re out on pasture.)
• 1 cup basil pesto - you can make your own, or I buy Cosco/Kirkland brand (”Cibo Naturals”) - it’s very tasty and it has a great label: I can pronounce and recognize everything, it’s fairly short, and the ingredients are all natural - how refreshing!
• Thick slices of mozzarella cheese - one for each piece of chicken(I’ll use shredded sometimes, too)

1. Preheat oven to 350* F/175* C
2. Butter a baking pan, lay out chicken pieces
3. Put 2-3 T. of pesto onto each chicken breast
4. Bake uncovered 35-40 minutes, place a piece of cheese onto each piece of chicken, then back into the oven for another 5-10 minutes to melt the cheese (I just made it again and put the cheese on before it went into the oven and in 35 minutes the chicken was done and the cheese was golden brown. The timing will depend on how thick your chicken is.)
Adjust the times as needed for your oven to make sure your chicken is done, but not over-done and dried out.

EVEN EASIER VERSION: I tried making this without the pesto, since my kids don’t like it, and it was still really tasty, maybe even better! I put the chicken onto a buttered cookie sheet (I also do parchment paper first), add sea salt and pepper, then sprinkle various kinds of shredded cheese on it, with some parmesan on top, bake the same amount of time, and it melted in your mouth!
http://kellythekitchenkop.com/2008/04/easy-main-dish-chicken-pesto-recipe.html