I think the Sizzling Chicken Fajitas (from the Smitten Kitchen blog) is one of those recipes that ended up on my list because Deb shared it on social. Or maybe because a friend mentioned making fajitas for dinner one night. Either way, I’m glad they were on the list.

At a glance, this is one of those recipes that seems really involved. And it certainly could be! There are a lot of accompaniments you could make yourself. I did these on easy mode, and only made the pico and the fajitas themselves. Everything else was store bought, except the pickled red onions which we always have in the fridge.

I prepped the pico and the chicken the day before so they could sit overnight in the fridge, which made this a very weeknight-friendly meal. I did follow Deb’s instruction at the top to set everything out before you start cooking, which means I didn’t have to scramble to do that as the cooking was wrapping up.

I made the slacker pico that Deb includes in the recipe. Basically I diced tomatoes until I had the volume I wanted, and then eyeballed minced onion, jalapeno, and cilantro. Some salt and juice of half a lime and that was done. The amount of marinade the recipe makes for the amount of chicken is pretty small, so if you have more chicken you might want to bump it up a bit, or at least add a little more of the spices. It didn’t look like it was going to make chicken that was particularly flavorful, but I trusted the process and in the end it was just right.

I used three small/medium bell peppers from the farmer’s market (yellow, orange, and purple), and most of one large white onion (minus what went in the pico). That made for a fairly veggie-forward fajita mix, which is what I wanted.

In addition to the pico, I served this with black beans, shredded taco mix cheese, cotija, guac, pickled jalapenos, and pickled red onions. (The only thing on that list that I had to buy was the guac, the rest was all stuff we already had on hand. ) We thought the black beans were extraneous, though if you’re trying to feed four you do probably want them. You can definitely simplify here, and just do two or three of your favorite fajita toppings, buy the pre-made pico (the one from our local organic market is pretty good), or whatever else makes it easy to get on the table.

I did not bring my cast iron pan to the table for the full fajita experience because our taco night table tends to be pretty crowded and I didn’t want one of us to get burned.

The only slight bump in the road that I ran into was that after a few minutes in the pan, my chicken had thrown off a lot of liquid. Normally I’d just let it cook down, but I was hungry and decided to (very, very carefully) spoon some off. As a result my chicken didn’t really brown, but it did pick up some fond from the peppers and onions and a lot of nice color.

We really enjoyed these. Usually when I make tacos I’m making a shredded or crumbly filling, like chicken tinga or something with chorizo. Or we’re using leftover roasted chicken. This was a nice change of pace, and I really liked the peppers and onions. The two types of cheese were definitely overkill but we had them both so I figured why not put them out.