Ever on the quest for new recipes, I was flipping through my cookbook Southern Living: 30 Years of Our Best Recipes and came up with the following meal: Balsamic marinated chicken with beer rice and sugared carrots. The balsamic chicken browned beautifully while cooking and had a really nice flavor of rosemary and balsamic. Nothing overwhelming and I think it would have been very moist still if we hadn’t let it sit for a while until the munchkin was in bed.

The beer rice also exceeded my expectations. I picked it because I had no idea what to cook with the chicken aside from some carrots we had in the fridge that needed to be used up. So as I flipped through the cookbook, the beer rice recipe caught my eye. Actually it was the note about the recipe stating how important it is to have a good rice recipe that is versatile which really got my attention. The flavor ended up being similar to the boxed Rice-a-Roni chicken stuff but SO much better. I think you could also use wine instead of beer and give it a really nice flavor. This rice dish has definitely found its way into our meal rotations and can be used as a side for tons of things. I found both the chicken and rice recipes to be extremely easy to prepare and cook with very little time demanded from the cook which is always a plus when cooking during the week.