Honey Mustard Chicken with Spinach Salad

Recently I have become obsessed with mustard. Not corn dog, scary yellow mustard, or the little parking lot packet that you step on, squirting it across the asphalt type of mustard. I mean real mustard, with real mustard seeds. Delicious honey mustard.

Obsessed with Honey Mustard

I’ve been trying different mustard recipes, but without much success. But that doesn’t mean that deliciousness didn’t happen. But the result morphed into something else that we could enjoy, albeit not a jarred type of honey mustard. In the true spirit of a foodie, I chose to make an edible mistake. This Honey Mustard Chicken with Spinach Salad was the result of a failed jarred honey mustard attempt.

Traditional mustards do not use eggs, or so I have been told. Nonetheless, there are plenty of mustard recipes out there that do include eggs, even though they are more of a mustard emulsion/vinaigrette. I’m not sure what was on my mind, but the orginal recipe for this egg based mustard required cooking. I forgot to cook my test recipe, but voila! Something else.

Delicious Spinach Salad

If you are concerened about the uncooked eggs, don’t be. While the chicken bakes, the eggs in the vinaigrette will cook. And when you heat the vinaigrette for the spinach salad, the eggs will cook. When used as a warmed salad dressing, you will get some cooked threads of egg, but that didn’t really bother me.

I even used a bit of the dressing as a condiment for the chicken, but make sure you don’t use any of the leftover basting vinaigrette as a condiment. Even though the dressing has uncooked eggs, I felt that the added vinegar mitigated any risk. I don’t feel the same way about raw chicken juice. Simply discard any small amount of dressing that may have come in contact with the chicken through the basting brush.

Be Creative with Garnishes

You can top the salad with any number of garnishes, but the season right now calls for lovely ripe pears or apples, so that is what I used. You can substitute chopped green onions for the onion slivers, or even use some toasted almonds, or the traditional bacon bits. Warm spinach salad with honey mustard vinaigrette is hard to beat, no matter how you garnish it.

There will be more mustard recipes soon, but here is a good one for right now. Not exactly true mustard, but a lovely and easy baked chicken recipe.