Cooking is hard when life is crazy. I’ve been told that no one truly understands what “busy” really means until they have kids, and maybe one day I’ll agree with that when I have multiple kids, but I still feel like life can get pretty crazy right now. Between teaching, helping with the play, and blogging, sometimes it feels like the days are just going non stop!

And that definitely makes cooking in the evenings hard. It’s waaayyyy easier to just get in the car and grab some food at a quick restaurant. Or call Pizza Hut. Or a Chinese take out place. Wanna know what we had for dinner last night? Ramen. Yep – like college students. So even though I’m a food blogger and LOVE to cook, it’s still hard for me to do it on busy weeknight evenings when it’s so much easier to heat up a can of soup or call the local delivery place!

Which is why this chicken recipe is so perfect. If you are going to cook on a weeknight but you don’t get home from work until pretty late or your life is crazy with a couple kids, complicated, fussy meals just aren’t an option. Which is unfortunate, because complicated, fussy meals are my favorite to make 😀. But sometimes you just need a super simple baked chicken breast instead! The hardest part of this chicken is the marinade…which is saying something since it’s just a few ingredients thrown together in a ziplock bag. From there, you just season the chicken with some extra chili powder, throw it in a preheated oven, and pull it out less than twenty minutes later.

Too simple for how yummy it is!

The marinade is super simple to make and really adds a lot of flavor to the chicken:

Lime juice
Garlic
Honey
Chili powder
Salt

Marinate it for as long as you can! If you only have thirty minutes, that’s just fine. I recommend at least an hour, or maybe you can even throw the marinade together before you head off to work in the morning, but any time you have will work.

Once you’re done marinating the chicken, pat it dry, brush it with oil, and add another layer of chili flavor with some extra chili powder and salt. Then you just have to bake it! For fifteen minutes plus a few minutes on broil.

Squeeze it with some extra lime juice, let it rest, and serve it up! We loooove to eat this with coconut lime quinoa, which is ALSO super easy. You just throw the ingredients in a rice cooker and let it go.

Three cheers for dinners that couldn’t be simpler for those weeks that couldn’t be busier!

You know what I’ve been absolutely loving lately, especially because our schedules have been so crazy? Coffee dates. Coffee dates aren’t something my husband and I used to do – our dates are usually movies or food or something else random and date-like, but never coffee!

Several weekends ago, we felt like getting out of the house, and I was in the mood for coffee, so we went on a “coffee date.” We ended up spending like an hour and a half in this coffee shop just sipping yummy coffee and talking about everything. And it was so much fun. Not to mention it’s a super cheap date.

We have this local coffee place here called “Radina’s,” and they not only have wonderful coffee, but they also have these really awesome hand made pottery mugs that they serve your coffee in if it isn’t a to-go order. The coffee mugs make it even more fun because they are fun to drink out of 😍. My volleyball team that I coached this year actually bought me one as a gift, and it’s my favorite mug EVA, and I drink out of it every day.

So since that Saturday several weekends ago, coffee dates are one of our new favorite weekend activities. It gets you out of the house for a while, gives you a great, cheap date, and gives you tons of time to just chat and catch up after the busy week.

Soooo….the solution for busy weeks: coffee dates to slow down on weekends, and quick, speedy, and simple dinners for crazy weeknights! Sounds like a good plan to me 😍.

Baked Chili Lime Chicken Breasts

Author: Annie Chesson
Prep Time: 10 mins
Cook Time: 20 mins
Total Time: 30 mins
Yield: 4 servings 1x

Ingredients

Scale

4 chicken breasts
2 cloves crushed garlic
3 limes
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon chili powder + 2 teaspoons, divided
2 teaspoons salt

Instructions

To marinate the chicken, add the breasts to a large ziplock bag. To the bag, add the juice from 2 of your limes (reserve the 3rd for later), the crushed garlic, the honey, and 1 tablespoon of the chili powder (reserve the other 2 teaspoons for later)
Marinate the chicken for at least an hour, if you can
When the chicken is done marinating, preheat your oven to 450 degrees
Lay the chicken breasts across a few sheets of paper towels and pat the chicken dry with more paper towels. Transfer the chicken breasts to a baking sheet
Pour 2 tablespoons of olive oil into a small bowl, and using a pastry brush, brush both sides of the chicken breasts evenly with the oil
Season the chicken breasts with some salt and 1/4 teaspoon of chili powder on each side of each chicken breast. So each chicken breast as a whole should be seasoned with 1/2 teaspoon of chili powder
If you need to, you can use the pastry brush to spread the seasoning around on the chicken breasts and make sure it’s evenly displaced
Place the baking sheet in the oven and bake the chicken for 15 minutes. When the 15 minutes are up, turn the oven to broil, and broil for about 2-3 minutes to help the tops of the chicken breasts brown
When done, remove the chicken breasts to a plate, squeeze about half of your remaining lime over the top of the breasts (you can squeeze the whole thing if you want it extra lime-y), and let the chicken rest for 5 to 10 minutes before serving