Chicken Breast with Mustard Gravy & Broccoli
Stir a spoonful of mustard and a splash of milk into the hot chicken pan, let it bubble down for two minutes, and you have a gravy that tastes like Sunday dinner. That single move is the backbone of this plate. Baby potatoes browned in olive oil, broccoli boiled just past frozen, and chicken strips under a creamy mustard sauce, all in fifteen minutes.
The gravy trick works because the mustard and milk reduce into something richer than either ingredient would suggest on its own. The potatoes get a second sear after cooking through, so they are soft inside and golden outside. The broccoli stays bright and just past al dente. And the whole plate lands at 621 kcal with 36 grams of protein, most of it quietly coming from four different sources instead of one oversized chicken breast.
Ingredients
- baby potatoes 0.5 pound
- olive oil 1.5 tablespoon
- broccoli florets (frozen) 3.5 cup
- chicken breast 3 ounces
- yellow mustard 1 tablespoon
- milk, 2% reduced fat 3.5 fluid ounce
Method
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Toss the baby potatoes in a skillet with half of the oil and cook them, covered, over medium-high heat for 6-8 minutes until they're cooked through. Then, brown them for another 3-4 minutes, stirring occasionally.
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In the meantime, boil the broccoli florets in a pot of salted water for 4-6 minutes until al dente. Then drain.
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Cut the chicken breast into strips and season them with salt and pepper.
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Heat the remaining oil in a small frying pan and cook the chicken strips for 4-6 minutes until they're nicely browned and cooked through, flipping them halfway. Keep the strips warm on a plate.
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Stir the mustard and milk into the pan and let it reduce over high heat until it's a tasty gravy.
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Serve the chicken strips with the mustard gravy, roasted baby potatoes and broccoli.
Also delicious to roast some rosemary with the baby potatoes for an herby, crispy edge.
Frozen broccoli is blanched before packaging, which destroys the enzyme it needs to produce its most studied protective compound (sulforaphane). Mustard comes from the same plant family and carries its own copy of that enzyme. A human trial found that adding just 1 gram of mustard powder to cooked broccoli quadrupled the amount of that compound the body absorbed (Okunade et al., 2018). The researchers added mustard after cooking, not during, so a pinch of dry mustard powder over your broccoli at the table is the version they tested.
Mustard + Broccoli Enzyme Rescue · DOIBehind this recipe
Why does this recipe only use 84 grams of chicken?
The protein does not all come from the chicken. This plate delivers 36 grams of protein from four sources: the chicken breast (roughly 22g), the baby potatoes (about 5g), the broccoli (around 7g), and the milk in the gravy (about 3g). A small chicken portion keeps the fat and calorie total in check while the sides quietly contribute protein the recipe does not advertise.
Can I use fresh broccoli instead of frozen?
Yes, and it changes the food chemistry. Fresh broccoli still has its own active enzyme that produces sulforaphane during chewing and digestion. Frozen broccoli loses that enzyme during the commercial blanching step before packaging. If you stick with frozen, a pinch of mustard powder sprinkled over the broccoli at serving restores the conversion pathway. A human trial found this quadrupled the compound's absorption (Okunade et al., 2018).
Is 62 grams of carbs too much for dinner?
Research says no. A controlled trial found that shifting most of the day's carbs to dinner produced 28% more weight loss than spreading them evenly throughout the day. The 62 grams here come mostly from baby potatoes, a whole-food carb source with fiber that slows digestion. If you are tracking macros, the question that matters more than timing is total daily intake.
