Healthy Chicken and Rutabaga Bake with Creamy Spinach

This healthy chicken and rutabaga bake with creamy spinach is a healthy, low carb meal that's still comforting and satisfying.

This chicken and rutabaga bake was a bit of a happy accident. I wanted to make traditional Romanian stuffed kholrabi (gulii umplute), which is a bit like Romanian stuffed peppers or Romanian cabbage rolls but made with kholrabi.

I ordered my groceries online and since I'd never ordered kholrabi in the Netherlands before, I used Google Translate to figure out what kholrabi is called in Dutch.

Unfortunately through a series of funny events, instead of ordering 5 kholrabi, I ended up with 5 (enormous) rutabagas. Well...cue recipe development mode.

I tried to think of ways to use up the rutabaga and of all the experimentation, this recipe was my favourite.

The rutabaga adds nice flavor and goes really well with chicken, spinach, garlic, white pepper and nutmeg.

Although rutabaga takes quite a while to cook through (you'll notice the cooking time in the recipe card is quite high) the recipe is otherwise really fast and easy to prepare.

You'll end up with a nice comforting meal that's flavorful but low calorie, low carb and full of veggies.

Ingredients

This dish is made with simple, whole food ingredients.

• Rutabaga: Rutabaga is an oft overlooked root vegetable that's great for baking. It has a sweet, slightly spicy and pungent flavor a bit like radish or celeriac. It's quite light in starch but still has enough to bake up into a creamy and satisfying dish that has a nice, rich mouthfeel. You'll need enough rutabaga to cover the bottom and top of a roasting pan. This will depend a bit on the size of your roasting pan. For me it was approximately 2 cups. Usually a small whole rutabaga is enough.
• Ground chicken: Ground chicken keeps the dish light. I used a mix of dark and white meat, which is still light but has a bit more flavor than just white meat.
• Egg: The egg adds structure and helps to bind the other ingredients together.
• Frozen spinach: Frozen spinach is a great way to easily add extra fiber and vitamins to a dish. The slightly peppery flavor of spinach is complemented really nicely by the seasoning, in particular the white pepper and nutmeg.
• Aromatics (garlic and shallots): Garlic and shallot bring a nice flavor base and also bulk up the dish a bit with some extra fiber.
• Butter: There's very little added fat in this dish but the addition of butter helps the rutabaga to bake up evenly and adds a bit of extra flavor.
• Flour: The flour helps to bind all the filling ingredients and creates a creamy, consistent texture.
• Seasoning (salt, garlic powder, white pepper, nutmeg): The seasonings chosen here complement the spicy and peppery notes of the other ingredients.

Instructions

Start by peeling and cutting the rutabaga. You'll need to cut it into very thin strips.

You can do this by cutting it first into quarters, and then into thin strips as shown below. You could also use a mandolin or food processor to make it faster, easier and more consistent.

Once the rutabaga is cut then just mix the ground chicken, spinach, flour, eggs, shallot, garlic, white pepper and nutmeg in a bowl.

Add 2 teaspoons of the salt, reserving half a teaspoon for the rutabaga. Likewise, reserve the garlic powder and butter to season the rutabaga.

After you've mixed up the filling, then simple grease the roasting pan with half the butter and start layering in the sliced rutabaga.

Once a layer of rutabaga is down, sprinkle it with a bit of salt then layer on the chicken mixture.

After the chicken is in, just add another layer of sliced rutabaga. Melt the remaining butter and drizzle or brush it on. Then sprinkle on the garlic powder and the remaining salt.

Remember to roast the rutabaga bake covered with a lid or some aluminum foil. This is to help it cook through but also to prevent charring on the edges of the slices.

Since rutabaga contains natural sugars it can actually burn on the thin edges before the pieces are actually cooked.

After about an hour of roasting the rutabaga should be cooked through (or very close to it) so you can uncover to get a bit of color on it in the final stage of roasting.

Equipment

Any large oven safe roasting dish will do as long as it isn't too large. The rutabaga should be covered so a lid is helpful but you can also just use some aluminum foil.

I used a Staub cast iron oval roasting dish which is 24 cm / 9.4 inches at its longest point. It was just the right size for this recipe.

If you use a much larger roasting dish then you may want to scale up the recipe.

Serving Suggestion

This chicken and rutabaga bake is a one pot meal so you can just enjoy it as is.

You could combine with some more fresh steamed veggies like steamed broccoli and cauliflower or a light side salad.

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