Easy Honey Mustard Mozzarella Chicken: Têm

 This was the title of a recipe Pam read to me as we made the Friday mid-day transition from "we have plenty of food so we don't need to shop for dinner" to the making of an actual plan.

My response was, "I like every word of that title!"

She then read the ingredient list, answering herself with "Têm!" after every word. This is a bit of family lore, dating back to my dissertation travel in Rondônia in 1996. A neighbor who enjoyed sharing a lot of foods with me invited me to cook a big meal in his kitchen. I would need ingredients that I had not yet seen in the area. As I asked him about each thing I would need to make a chicken and pasta dinner, he would nod solemnly and pronounce "Têm!" -- "They have it!" This sounds so much better in Portuguese, so it is how we share the good news that what we need is on hand. (That meal, by the way, became a minor legend. During a return visit in 2000, people would stop me in the street to ask me if I could cook for them again.)

But I digress. We had everything mentioned in the title of Easy Honey Mustard Mozzarella Chicken, plus the additional ingredients: lemon, pepper, and above all: bacon.

This is another recipe that it is taking me longer to describe than it might take a reader to prepare. I began by putting the rice on to cook as a side dish, and then following the recipe almost to the letter. I used a splash of lemon with the ground pepper, since our jar of lemon-pepper was in the other kitchen. And I used some nice fresh mozzarella, which I shredded/crumbled. The only thing I will do differently next time is to put the bacon on earlier in the process; the thick slices we use could not really crisp in 10 minutes. 

Lagniappe

When I don't think a dish will make for a good photo, sometimes I take a photo of the ingredients, or of the dish in progress. Other times I will poach a photo from the recipe website. In this case, just trust me: this is more delicious and easy than it is photogenic. It just looks like melted cheese at the end. The website has 70 photos. I scrolled through half of them before I concluded that there are a lot of ways to make this look ugly.