Serve these Portobello-Stuffed Chicken Thighs with potatoes or wild rice, and white wine. You’ll have a lovely and fancy meal on your hands. They’re sophisticated, extraordinarily tasty, and a lot more like restaurant food than home cooking.

Ingredients to serve 8:

1 Tbs + 2 tsp olive oil, plus more for drizzling
¾ cup dried, homemade breadcrumbs
2-3 sprigs fresh rosemary
3 Tbs (packed) dried cranberries
1 large shallot
1 medium-to-large clove garlic
8 oz. portobello mushrooms
1 Tbs butter
¼ cup white wine^[a]
4 oz. goat cheese
¼ cup chopped pistachios
½ cup milk
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
8 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
1½ packages bacon (about 24 oz.)^[b]
2 Roma tomatoes, sliced lengthwise into ¼-inch slices

How to do it:

1. Preheat a 12-inch cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Add 2 tsp oil; wait 30 seconds and then add the breadcrumbs. Toast the crumbs, stirring constantly, until medium-to-dark brown. Remove from pan and set aside. (This can be done days [room temperature] or even weeks [freezer] in advance.)
2. Strip the leaves off of enough rosemary sprigs to produce 1 Tbs tightly-packed leaves. Set aside.
3. Mince the cranberries in a food processor.^[c] Transfer them into a mixing bowl. Re-use the processor to pulse the shallot, garlic, and set-aside rosemary leaves, until minced. Add that to the mixing bowl. Place about ⅓ of the mushrooms into the processor, breaking them into chunks as you do. Pulse until minced, and add them to the mixing bowl. Repeat this process two more times, to mince all the mushrooms and get them all into the mixing bowl. Toss the mixing bowl mixture thoroughly.
4. Place butter and remaining Tbs of oil into the same skillet you used for the breadcrumbs, and set the heat to medium-high. As soon as the butter’s fully melted, stir in the contents of the mixing bowl. Cook until mixture is softened and somewhat dry, about 6 minutes. Use the wine to the deglaze the pan. Off heat. Stir in the goat cheese, breadcrumbs, pistachios, and milk; mix until the filling comes together. Check seasoning. Set aside.

5. Place a large sheet of aluminum foil on a cutting board and ready a sheet of clingfilm of roughly the same size. Trim the chicken of any excess fat. Place the thighs on the foil, cover them with the film, and pound them to a uniform thickness. (You may have to do this in batches, unless you have an unbelievably huge cutting board.) Season the chicken lightly, lay them with the membrane side (the side that used to have the skin) down, and then divide the filling mixture among the thighs. Spread the filling across the thighs, to an even thickness. Next, roll each thigh like a jellyroll.
6. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
7. Each chicken roll will require 2½ slices of bacon. (Kitchen shears are the easiest way to cut slices in half.) Separate the bacon slices from the package carefully, so that you don’t stretch them out. For each chicken roll, do this: lay out the half-slice of bacon horizontally on the cutting board. Place one of the other slices parallel to it, above, so that the edges of both slices are snuggled up to one another, with their left edges aligned. Do the same thing with the remaining full slice, placing it below the half-slice. It should look like the picture to the right. Next, pretending that the bacon slices are a map of the United States, place the chicken roll onto the west coast, orienting it so that its short ends reach over the border into Canada and Mexico. You should now have the Rocky Mountains stretching along the entire western seaboard of North America, made of chicken. Carefully roll it toward the Atlantic Ocean, making sure to wrap the chicken in the bacon as you go. The half-slice should make it all the way around the chicken roll. The longer slices, as they begin to overlap, nudge the north one north and the south one south, so that by the time you’re done rolling, you’ve covered the entire chicken roll in bacon.
8. Place a rack into the bottom of a 9″ x 13″ baking dish. Place the chicken rolls on the rack. Top the rolls with the tomato. Finish with a drizzle of oil.
9. Bake until the bacon is crispy, and the tomatoes have begun to blacken, about 1 hr. 15 min.

Notes:

Best when freshly made. It reheats well enough that you won’t mind having the leftovers for lunch (I like it for breakfast), but the bacon will have lost its crunch.

1. I will open a bottle of white wine for cooking purposes only rarely, and when I do, I generally intend to finish the bottle with the meal. (Not by myself, silly!) When I’m not in the mood for wine with dinner – which is quite common at home – I’ll substitute a 50/50 mixture of vermouth and water for the wine required by the recipe. I always seem to have an open bottle of vermouth that needs to get used up; doesn’t everyone? In fact, vermouth-and-water is my go-to, white cooking wine.
2. I tried a flat, bacon-less, pan-fried version of this dish (pictured below), and I liked it a lot. I used two pounded, lightly seasoned thighs as “bread” for a sandwich thick with about ½-cup mushroom filling. I dusted the sandwich in flour, and then fried it in oil over a medium-high flame for 9 minutes, flipped it, and baked it at 350ºF for a half-hour.
3. Here’s a trick: before mincing the cranberries, spray the blades of your processor with non-stick spray.

(Bacon Wrapped) Chicken Thighs Stuffed with Portobellos, Rosemary, Pistachio, and Goat Cheese

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! This post was inspired by Socratic Food and ABC. Thank you, Kesor. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything.

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