Baked Maple Lime Drumsticks

While there is no end to new recipes for festive cheer on the internet right now, sometimes we still need regular dinner ideas, am I right? Not fancy, time consuming, dinner ideas for entertaining, but ideas that can are easy to squeeze into our busy lives.

And, while these chicken drumsticks aren’t exactly covered with powdered sugar or cranberries, they are made with seasonal herbs and citrus 🙂

Even santa needs protein right?

Enter Baked Maple Lime Drumsticks. The flavor of this chicken is so good, and so easy to accomplish. After you marinate the drumsticks for a few hours, you just dump everything in a 9X13, and bake them right in the liquid, so they stay nice and moist. Also, the fact that they can marinate up to overnight means that they’re really easy to prepare ahead of time.

I only marinated mine for 3 hours, just to make sure that the minimum amount of time was enough, and it really was! They are very flavorful. Maple syrup and citrus combined do really good things for a marinade. It’s such a nice balance of sweet and tangy!

I’ve mentioned before how much more savory cooking I’ve done since Taylor and I got married. When I was single, I cooked savory food more as a necessity, and baked sweet things for the pleasure and creativity of it. I quickly realized that my single diet of spaghetti and grilled cheese sandwiches wasn’t going to be as satisfactory to Taylor as it was to me.

This forced me way out of my carbohydrate comfort zone and into the handling raw meat zone 🙁

I wasn’t so much grossed out that I had to touch it, as I was just freaked out that I was going to poison my new husband by undercooking the meat! I bought a digital thermometer, and tested everything 5 times before I felt safe enough to take it out of the oven.

Now, I’ve gotten much better at knowing when meat is done by looking at it (although I still take the temp at least once!)

Raw meat is no longer scary, and I’ve come to like savory cooking almost as much as baking, and I’m sure we’ve both benefited from not eating noodles and grilled cheese every night of the week!

Red pepper flakes are becoming one of my favorite ways to add heat to a dish. I’m such a baby when it comes to heat, and the pepper flakes are so mild, that I can be more liberal with them without being punished later.

In this season of cookies, pies, hot chocolate, and roasted marshmallows, don’t forget to eat a little protein to power through your holiday shopping 😉