Chicken Morsels with Peppers

(The peppers look like peaches, I know. I'm not a professional food photographer or food designer. It's real food.)

2 large yellow bell peppers, halved and seeded
2 large red bell peppers, halved and seeded
1 1/4 lb boneless, skinless chicken breasts
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/3 cup olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 tbsp minced garlic
2 large tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and cut into strips (juices reserved)

1. Preheat broiler. Arrange peppers on a broiler pan. Broil until blackened and blistered. Transfer to bowl, cover, and let cool for about 10 minutes. Peel off skins, remove stems, and cut into wide strips.
2. Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper to taste. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over high heat. Add chicken and brown on all sides. Reduce heat to medium-low and add onions, garlic, bell peppers, tomato strips and their juices. Simmer until chicken is tender, 20-25 minutes. Transfer to a warmed serving platter. Serve at once.

Recipe from Williams-Sonoma The Best of Taste.

CHANGES I MADE:

• I used all yellow bell peppers, as that's what I have in my garden.
• Instead of two large tomatoes, I used two rather mediocre tomatoes. I meant to use three rather mediocre tomatoes, but one didn't survive the blanching process, and I didn't feel like running outside in the driving rain to pick another tomato in the dark and start the whole blanching process again. Lazy, I know.
• As usual, I am incapable of following even simple directions. When I took the peppers out of the oven, I did not transfer them to a bowl and cover them with a towel (not in the directions, but after reading all about roasting bell pepper on the internet this evening, I have discovered the towel method is quite popular). That, apparently, would have made taking the skins off the pepper much easier. I only had trouble with the very edges, though, so I guess no harm, no foul.
• I didn't add the salt and pepper until I added everything else. Directions. Arg!
• The recipe is called chicken morsels, but nowhere does it tell you when to cut it into morsels, so I did that before cooking it. I knew that it would cut down on the cooking time, and I started this recipe way too late in the evening, so I was looking to trim time wherever I could.
• I didn't bother with the warmed serving platter. My household isn't the warmed-serving-platter type of household. We're more the served-directly-from-the-skillet type of people.
• I served it with brown rice.

THINGS I LEARNED

• Even a short recipe may take a long time. Reading the directions all the way through before embarking on a new mission may be the way to go. I don't know for sure, as I've obviously never tried it, but it seems like a good bet.
• I learned how to blacken peppers in the oven. And I learned how to do it correctly after we'd eaten dinner.
• Warm serving platters are probably nice, but definitely not as necessary as this recipe make out.

OPINIONS:

Bill: Liked it. Enough to eat a second helping, even. It isn't in his top five of the recipes we've had so far, but he'd definitely eat it again.

Me: I really enjoyed it. I added too much pepper, I think, but that's easily adjusted in the future. And even the time involved in this wouldn't be bad if it weren't steamy and warm. I'll bet I'll take another stab at this in the winter when I want to heat up my kitchen.

Emma: Loved it. In typical Emma style, she ate the peppers first, then the rice, then the chicken. She ate it all, though.

Georgia: Hey, it was chicken, so she ate that. And surprisingly, she also at the rice. Normally, she isn't big into plain brown rice, but we had to get more for her, so there's that.