Mango-Habanero Chicken with Spanish Rice and Peppered Corn

Here is today's second random dinner post (which is another copy-over from my old blog).

I love rifling through the fridge and cabinets, seeing what we have lying around or needing to be consumed, and creating a random meal.  I really do love it.  I am a huge proponent of not wasting anything, so I take pride in these “use stuff up” ventures.  A couple weeks ago, on a Tuesday specifically, I did just that.  We had chicken breasts leftover from the package that got thawed to make Monday night's meal (the Chicken Parm with Roasted Veggies shown above), so I had to figure out a way to use them up.  Luckily, I thought ahead a little bit for this one….as I was waiting for Monday night's dinner to finish up in the oven, I tossed the rest of the chicken breasts into a Ziploc bag and then dumped into that bag an already-opened and about-a-quarter-used bottle of sweet hot sauce which was given to us by our friends Derek & Gretchen.  I don’t know the exact brand name offhand, but I think it was of the mango habanero variety (I do know that it was gluten-free, though -- I remember checking the ingredients before deciding to use it).  In any case, delicious.  I let the chicken marinate overnight.

Come Tuesday night, it was that much easier to make a quick dinner (Tuesday and Thursday are martial arts class nights in our house -- I study Muay Thai and Hubby studies Small Circle JuJitsu, so fast dinner is a good thing).  I perused the fridge and the cabinets, and here’s what I ended up with:

For the rice, I simply cooked one cup of dry brown rice in water plus several heaping scoops of hot salsa that was, you guessed it, half-used and in the fridge waiting for its destiny.  I finished the rice with a squeeze of lime juice (we had half a lime leftover from I don’t remember what), and also squeezed some of the juice over the chicken to tie them together palate-wise.  The corn was simply frozen kernels (cooked with “radar love” -- thank you Tony Bourdain for this new vocabulary term) topped by fresh cracked pepper.

MmmmmmMmmmmm.

It was a medium-heavy caloric meal.  I ate the plate pictured above *plus* another small chicken breast and a second serving of rice, for a total of about 650 calories (I am estimating slightly because I don’t know the exact counts for the mango habanero hot sauce).  However, it was all told, incredibly low fat (4 grams), and good on fiber (8 grams).  The sodium count (again, not counting the hot sauce) was a low 286 mg, with the protein and carbs balancing it all out at 51 grams and 91 grams respectively.  Given how hard I worked that night at Muay Thai -- coach estimates we each threw at least 1,500 (no, that’s not a typo) kicks! -- I think I earned this meal hands down.  :)

Oh, and as a bonus, here is an awesome GF chocolate chip cookie that Gretchen (same one mentioned above) baked for me and Hubby yesterday.  I figured I'd include it in this post since it and the hot sauce above came from the same friends.  I don't know the cookie recipe, but they were awesome!