[mojo]

Santa Fe Stuffed Chicken

Ingredients

8 oz. pkg. Monterey Jack cheese - divided in half
8 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves
1 cup Italian seasoned bread crumbs
1 1/2 Tbs grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 cup butter - melted
1 Tbs butter
1 Tbs all-purpose flour
1 cup milk
1 sm red bell pepper - diced
1 sm green bell pepper - diced

Directions

Place 1 chicken breast between two sheets of wax paper. Working from the center to the edges pound with a meat mallet until flat and rectangular shaped. Repeat with remaining breasts.

Cut half of the cheese in 8 slices. Wrap each flattened chicken breasts around a slice of cheese. Secure with wooden picks or uncooked spaghetti noodles.

Combine the bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, salt, cumin and pepper. Roll the secured chicken pieces in the melted butter and then in the bread crumb mixture. Place chicken breasts in a 13" X 9" baking dish, being careful not to crowd them. Drizzle remaining butter over the breasts.

Refrigerate for 1 hour or freeze to bake later (baking time will be increased by about 5 to 10 minutes).

Bake in 400 degree oven for 25-30 minutes, or until chicken cooked through.

Grate remaining cheese. Melt butter in saucepan. Stir in flour. Whisk in milk. Bring to a simmer. Add cheese and reduce heat. Simmer until thick, stirring constantly so cheese doesn't burn.

Place chicken on plates, pour sauce over, and top with diced peppers.

[MSL]

  Probably I didn't read something about Santa Fe for decades. And it was one of the first US cities I learned about. I like this name.
 Some more info for the users, who are not familiar with the place:

Santa Fe (/ˌsæntəˈfeɪ/; (Tewa: Ogha Po'oge, Navajo: Yootó) is the capital of the state of New Mexico. It is the fourth-largest city in the state and is the seat of Santa Fe County.

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe,_New_Mexico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License}

[mojo]

Various regional areas of the US have different cooking styles or types of recipes that mark their origin. Such as Tex-Mex, or Santa Fe. Tex-Mex is normally a mixture of Texas and Mexican in preparation.

Santa Fe is often marked by hotter spices, often using ingredients such as chipotle pepers in adobe sauce. Chipotle peppers is merely the jalapeno pepper that has been smoked and dried to give it flavor. It is then packed in a sauce. I was surprised the first time I used adobo sauce in how hot it was. I was thinking that maybe I shouldn't have put so much in the recipe I was making. Turns out the cooked dish is not as hot as the product by itself. All the flavor and little of the pepper heat comes through.

[MSL]

 Some people really like it, but too hot is too much. It's even not healthy.
 Thank you for the link! Looks good.

[SEO]

As far as I know the most hot dishes in the world are the Mexican and the Sichuanese (Sichuan province, China). An example (Spiced fish stew; Sichuan cuisine):
^{From
cultural-china.com}.

[mojo]

You'll love these as a sample then of other places serving spicy hot foods. Nor is this the only ones. I read of another using the ghost peppers in their food, in England requiring a waver. The guy that ate it wound up in the hospital with part of his stomach lining consumed by the food.

One would think at the start that these signing waivers to absolve responsibility to the business as a gimmick. Not so, it's the real m^ccoy.

[SEO]

I edited some link that was wrong (linking to 'post reply' in this forum).

I didn't know there are 'ghost peppers' (btw, they are exceptionally hot). Very interesting name. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhut_jolokia.

[mojo]

Thank you for straightening my mess up, much appreciated.

[mojo]

You will notice the Scoville rating is mentioned in your wiki link. It's a way to measure the 'heat' of a pepper or hot sauce. Basically someone who has sensitivity to capsaicin (which is what makes a pepper hot) is hired to be a tester. They then halve the sample with water and then the taster, tastes to see if there is any heat in the sample. Eventually they wind up with a sample that has no heat to it and that is how the scoville rating is determined.

Normally I use a product called Dave's Insanity Sauce, which if you are interested you can look up on line, for added heat to a pot of food I'm cooking. It's not a really, really, high rating on the Scoville scale but it does the job. You don't use this product on the plate of food. You use it by the pot of food you're cooking.

Up till the ghost pepper, anything that reached 1 million Scovilles, was a distilled product made from the seeds of the pepper to concentrate the capsaicin. There has been a new pepper since the ghost pepper made and I can not recall the name of it today. The ghost pepper is no longer the hottest pepper in the world.

[SEO]

My pleasure! I only mentioned this edit to let you know what exactly I edited, not because I want to  stress how I'm hardworking.

Oh, I never supposed there are testers like those! I knew about wine and water. Very good to know it! Interesting information! Capsaicin... Yes. It's a very interesting active component of chili peppers.