Spinach and Pesto Chicken Breasts

Unfortunately my diet and exercise regimen has been taking away from my cooking time and variations and because of this I have not blogged nearly frequently enough.  However, today after an intense 60 minutes of plyometrics, well actually about half way through, I started thinking about what kind of chicken we would be having tonight.  We have been eating chicken nearly everyday since the 1st of the year and creativity is the name of the game.  Most nights we just rub something on the chicken breasts, beat em out a bit with the mallet and throw them in the broiler.  Tonight though I got to thinking that we had a little spinach left in the fridge and a little swiss cheese.

Upon further inspection of the fridge and surrounding cupboards I found the rest of my ingredients to make a rather tasty, yet still fairly healthy dinner.

Ingredients
2 chicken breasts
1 clove garlic
1 tbsp pesto
20 spinach leaves stems removed
1/4 tsp black pepper
2 tsp grated parmesan
12 postage stamp size slices of swiss cheese
olive oil
salt
black pepper
dried basil leaves

Instructions
I started by combining spinach, garlic (minced), parmesan, 1/4 tsp black pepper and pesto in a mortar and pestle I recently got from Amazon.  I crushed all of these ingredients to a pulp and set aside.  I then poured about a tablespoon of olive oil in a glass baking dish and spread it around.  I proceeded to wash each of the chicken breast, butterfly them open and stuff them with half of pesto mixture and 6 of the pieces of cheese, I then rubbed them with olive oil, closed them up with toothpick sprinkled with salt, pepper and dried basil and placed them in the oven at 400ºF for 45 minutes or until the internal temperature reached 180ºF.  It was a little shy of 45 minutes.

For such an easy and relatively healthy dish it was quite tasty and we will be making it again.