Baked chicken & peaches with quinoa and sunflower cilantro lime sauce

Baked Chicken & Peaches with Quinoa and Tangy Sunflower Cilantro Lime Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 – 2 lb chicken cutlets (you can cut up breasts into strips or larger chunks too)
• 2 peaches, sliced
• 3/4 cup coconut milk
• 6 oz plain goat’s milk yogurt (or plain greek yogurt)
• 1/2 cup sunflower seed butter
• 2 tsp coconut sugar
• 2 limes, juiced (~1/4 cup) + the zest from 1 of the limes
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup cilantro
• 1/2 jalapeño, chopped with seeds removed

Directions:

Combine everything but the chicken and peaches and blend until nearly smooth (some cilantro and jalapeño chunks are okay in my opinon). You can use a large mixing bowl with an immersion blender like I did, or you can just add everything to a blender off the bat. Either way I don’t recommend trying to do this with a whisk. The jalapeño needs to get pulsed so it’s really mixed into the sauce.

Meanwhile, place the chicken cutlets and sliced peaches in a (greased) 9×11 baking dish and cover with foil*.  Bake at 350 degrees F for 30-35 minutes.  At the end, remove the foil and broil for a few minutes (the exact time will vary depending on the strength of your oven’s broil – mine is weaker and I did a full 5 minutes to brown the edges of the peaches).

*The sauce recipe will yield extra, so I recommend cooking the chicken and peaches with half of it as a marinade.  The other half can still be used as a sauce added on top afterwards.  The only reason I didn’t do this was because I was planning on giving some of the chicken to P (he’s allergic to dairy).  Also, at the time I thought the jalapeño would be too spicy for him, but after tasting it myself, I think he would have been fine with it.

This dish is amazing.  I’m using the leftover sauce to massage into kale for lunch and will probably end up licking every drop out of the bowl.