Weeknight chicken with healthy veggie side dishes in a pinch

You know what I really stink at? Side dishes. I can rock a main entree like nobody else but when it comes to making sure that I have healthy accompaniments to go with the star of the show, I fall seriously short.

Since Tim and I have been eating more healthfully and counting Weight Watchers points, I've been particularly focused on making sure we have healthy light side dishes to fill out our dinner plates. On busy weeknights, I find that to be a particular challenge.

My mom had a double oven and I've always been envious of her ability to make dishes without the worry of temperatures being equal. I feel like any time I find a yummy veggie side dish, it requires baking at a temperature that is totally different from my chicken!

So to challenge myself to get two healthy side dishes on my plate, it was a freeing experience to not think twice about the temps of the recipes I wanted to make! I love that you could make one item in the top oven and the other in the bottom.

I combined two of our favorite things for this dish: mustardy lemon chicken for me and roasted potatoes for Tim. To up the healthfulness of it, I added a big bag of frozen green beans.

Because the potatoes take longer to bake, I preheated the oven and prepped them first. While they were busy roasting, I moved onto prepping the sauce and the chicken.

One of my new favorite methods for cooking chicken involves browning it up briefly on the stovetop, pouring a sauce over it, and letting it finish it's baking inside the oven. The result is an extremely tender and juicy chicken that requires very little additional fat or oil.

While the bite-sized chicken chunks were sautéing in a small bit of olive oil, I mixed up the sauce using dijon mustard, fresh lemon juice, fresh garlic, a little chicken stock, and a packet of Italian dressing mix.

When the chicken had been browned on both sides, I poured the sauce over the top and brought it to a bubble.

Then I dumped the package of green beans over the top and popped the whole pan into the oven.

The chicken finished at the same time as the potatoes were ready.

Just before serving, I tossed the chicken and beans together with the sauce so that everything was nice and coated. To keep this under 10 Weight Watchers points per serving, I omitted using any kind of sauce thickener like corn starch. It's a nice juicy, drizzly sauce. If you're not concerned about points, adding a little corn starch would make this into a lovely pan gravy for your chicken and for dipping the crispy potatoes.

For 1 serving of the chicken, potatoes, and beans, the total came to only 9 points: 6 for the chicken, 3 for the potatoes. Green beans are 0 points. It made for a warm and filling meal that I could easily make during most of our weeknights.