Chicken Parmagiana is perhaps one of the simplest, most under-made recipes.  At least it is here at Cuisine Capers.  It is hard to say why that is, given that it is a full-flavored, hearty dish that really hits the comfort spot.

You may be asking yourself – Chicken Parmigiana?  Is that the same thing as Chicken Parmesan?  To most people, I’d say that it is the same thing — Chicken, covered in tomato sauce  and cheese and baked.  I will have to confess that I do not consider these things the same thing, as I have a different recipe that I make that I call Chicken Parmesan.  There also seems to be a plethora of ways to spell Chicken Parmigiana, including parmagiana.

It doesn’t really matter what you call it or how you spell it – all that it really matters is that it’s a satisfying dish.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 cup bread crumbs
• 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
• 2 teaspoons Italian Seasoning, 
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• 3 – 4 boneless, skinless Chicken Breast halves
• 1 jar prepared spaghetti sauce
• 1 cup grated pozzarella cheese
• 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Prepare 3 bowls used for dredging the chicken breasts.  In bowl #1, add the flour.  In bowl #2, beat one egg.  In bowl #3 combine bread crumbs, parmesan cheese, Italian Seasoning, and salt and pepper to taste.

Pat chicken breasts dry and dip into each bowl in order.  First, coat with flour lightly.  Next, add the chicken breast to the egg wash, ensuring that the breast is coated, yet not dripping with egg.  Last, dredge thoroughly in the bread crumb mixture, coating evenly.  

Add olive oil to ovenproof sautee pan, and heat until nearly smoking.  Slowly immerse each dredged chicken breast into the oil and allow to fry until a crunchy coating has formed.  Flip the chicken carefully, making sure that the coating maintains its integrity.  Once both sides are fried crisp, remove from the pan.

Here’s where you can make this recipe as complex or as easy as you would like.  There are many people who would recoil in horror at the thought of using a jarred spaghetti sauce.  I will admit that there are times that I am one of those poeple.  But when I want to make good food fast, I don’t mind compromising on a quality, jarred sauce.

Drain the leftover olive oil out of the pan, add the sauce to the same pan, and bring to a simmer. Add the chicken breasts to the sauce pan and remove from heat.  Spoon some of the sauce in the pan over the chicken breasts to lightly coat.  Add mozzarella and parmesan cheese to each breast.

Place in pre-heated oven and bake for 45 minutes, until cheese is melted and beginning to brown.

Serve with a side of pasta tossed in the sauce left in the pan, or with a roasted spaghetti squash, also tossed with the remaining pan sauce.

Bolognese alla Carbonara Bucatini

I’m not too sure what to call this recipe, for it is not a traditional bolognese, and it is certainly not a traditional carbonara.  On the other hand, it combines elements of both of these dishes into a hearty, satisfying pasta fitting for Sunday dinner.

I start with a base of good quality Italian Sausage, crumbled.  Into that goes diced pancetta, onions and garlic.  This is browned, and the richness of this sauce starts right at the beginning with the addition of cream to the meat as finishes browning.  Allow the meat to absorb the cream completely.  Follow this by adding red wine and allowing the sauce to simmer.

 Add coarsely chopped tomato once the sauce begins to simmer.  The key to this sauce is that it is not a tomato sauce.  It is a sauce with tomatoes in it.  This is an important distinction, so keep it in mind as you add the tomato.  Let the sauce simmer for up to two hours, adding cream as you go to maintain desired consistancy.

The carbonara portion of the recipe comes as you being to put together the dish for serving.  In a large bowl, whisk together eggs and cream.  Add cooked, hot pasta to the egg mixture and toss thoroughly to coat the pasta.  Then add the sauce to the same bowl, tossing to complete.

Serve topped with grated parmesan cheese and chopped basil.

Orechiette with Sausage, Beans, and Mascarpone

There are few episodes of “Everyday Italian” that I watch that do not inspire me to make something… immediately.  We affectionately call Giada the “Skinny Italian Chick” around these parts.  We watch her Food Network show, get really hungry, and refuse to believe that she eats more than the mere bite or two that she savors as she cooks for the cameras.

The other day I was certain that I had had my fill of pasta for a few days.  We had been binging on Italian-like foods, and I was a bit tired of it…  until I watched the Skinny Italian Chick make her Orechiette with Sausage, Beans and Mascarpone.  I did not make the recipe as she made it.  As is usual, I borrowed heavily from it and modified it to our tastes.

1 pound orechiette pasta
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 pound bulk Italian sausage
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1 tablespoon Oregano
1/2 cup mascarpone cheese
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook until tender but still firm to the bite, stirring occasionally, about 8 to 10 minutes. Drain pasta reserving 1 cup of the cooking liquid.

In a large, heavy skillet warm the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the sausage, garlic and onions. Break up the sausage into bite-sized pieces as it browns.
Continue cooking until the sausage is golden and the onions are tender. Add the beans and oregano cook for 2 more minutes. Add the cup of pasta cooking liquid and stir, scrapping up any brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the mascarpone and parmesan cheese and stir until it dissolved into a light sauce. Add the salt, pepper, and hot pasta. Stir until coated and serve.

We’ve long ago outgrown the desire to go out and live it up on New Years Eve. In the last few years we’ve made a tradition of settling in for a special meal, with special food and wine.

This is getting somewhat more and more challenging. We eat “special” meals all the time – we enjoy cooking and we prepare the nice meals that we like routinely. And with the holidays not too far off in the rear view mirror, we were all “hunk O’ beefed” out.

So after much discussion, we decided to make a more elaborate pasta dish. We like pasta and have it often enough, but we typically toss together a quick pasta dish that is brimming with fresh veggies and is basically very healthy.

We’d have none of that healthy stuff for this New Years Eve! So I thought about what sort of pasta dish would be tempting, and I decided I’d throw together a dish that combined all of our favorite pasta flavors. I’m calling it Stuffed Shells with Three Sauces.

It turned out very, very well.

I started with a nice mix of Italian Sausage from our local Italian deli, Fraboni’s. Fraboni’s is great, and I gladly spend a lot of money there! This was a mix of their bulk sausage – half mild, half spicy.

After browning the sausage with onion and garlic, and allowing it to cool, I mixed it with ricotta cheese, parmesan cheese, chopped spinach and an egg.

As the sausage was cooling, I went to work on the alfredo sauce. This was simple to make. I started with a simple roux, then added milk, some real cream, and lots of parmesan/romano grated cheese. I typically don’t salt the alfredo sauce, as the parmesan cheese can tend to be salt on it’s own. A touch of garlic and nutmeg, and the sauce was set aside for future use.

I had also boiled some pasta shells, then rinsed them with cold water to stop “stickage”. I had toyed with the idea of using manicotti shells when I first started putting this recipe together in my mind, but I had flashbacks to unfortunate stuffing incidents of times past, and decided Shells were much easier to work with.

And so I went to work on the assembly line. I lined the bottom of the baking dish with a simple, prepared tomato sauce. The shells stuffed quickly and easily, making me quite happy that I had chosen to use them.

Once all the shells were stuffed, it was time to finish assembling the dish. The alfredo sauce came first, ladled over the shells til they were covered nicely. Then a pesto sauce, made from homemade pesto that had been thinned down with chicken stock was drizzled over that. Finished off with a drizzle of the tomato sauce, the dish was looking quite colorful.

Then it was time to relax with an appetizer of imported proscuitto and aged asiago cheese shavings, served on a thinly sliced baguette dabbed with mustard. A Bogle Petite Sirah finished off the first course as the pasta baked in the oven.

The pasta was pulled from the oven bubbly, and was allowed to rest before being served with a Ridge Onyx red wine along side.

After the meal we gave the food some time to settle, and then we decided we were too full for the cannoli that we had earmarked for dessert. Instead we finished the evening off with Thomas Hardy’s Vintage Ale. Port is our usually our New Years Eve tradition, but when we moved out of our house last month we were reminded that we had some of this vintage ale stored away in our wine cellar. This vintage was 1994, and it had gotten even more smooth and chocolately over the years it had been resting away.

And with that – on to the new year. This year I’ll be focusing on more healthy cooking. I’ve gotten away from that in 2004, and I can tell. It’s time to get back into the swing of things and begin to pay attention again – because you really can prepare great food that is still very healthy. (And that doesn’t mean Alfredo sauce… at least not the way I made it this night!)

Happy New Year everyone.

We don’t grocery shop like most people. We very seldom shop for more than one meal at a time. Because we have our CSA box, in the summer almost any produce we use we already have. If we need tomatoes or peppers we go out to the backyard and pick them. This usually leaves meat as the wildcard for dinner.

Tonight I wasn’t in the mood to stop at the butcher shop and pick up meat. So I headed off for home vowing to just make dinner based on whatever we had on hand. That turned into Pasta, Potatoes and Pesto with green beans and tomatoes.

Ingredients:
4 small red potatoes, cut into bite-sized pieces
6 oz pasta
1 cup green beans, broken into bite-sized pieces
3 tomatoes, diced
4 garlic cloves, chopped
2 Grilled Italian sausages, chopped
2 tablespoons pesto
Chicken stock
Basil leaves, torn
Pepper to taste

Add potatoes to pot of salted water. Boil 10 minutes. Add pasta. Boil 5 minutes. Add green beans. Boil 5 minutes. When all three are done, drain in pot.

Add tomatoes, garlic. sausage and pesto to pot. Stir well. Add chicken stock to mixture until desired consistency is reached. Pour into serving dish. Sprinkle with basil leaves. Pepper to taste.

I personally do not like bell peppers. I like just about any other kind of pepper, but there’s something about bell pepper that just rubs me the wrong way. I think it’s genetic – my sister feels the same way.

Of course, the other member of this household LOVES bell peppers. There is a constant conflict due to this, and due to the fact that I love mushrooms and he doesn’t. He disparingly refers to mushrooms as fungi, with a sneer and a turn up of the nose.

To continuously show that I am the better person, I make things with bell peppers all the time, while disregarding my yen for mushrooms. I’m applying for sainthood soon.

And with that, a true summer meal – Stuffed peppers and and zucchini with corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes along side.

Recipe as follows:

Ingredients:

2 large bell peppers, halved, innards removed
1 large zucchini, halved, innards removed
1 lb ground sirloin, crumbled and cooked through
2 teaspoons garlic, chopped
2 cups cooked rice
1 cup tomato sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
Shredded cheese

Heat oven to 375

Combine beef, garlic, rice, tomato sauce. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Stuff in vegetable shells. Place on cooking pan, sprayed with cooking oil. Sprinkle with cheese. Cook 20 minutes.

Dinner tonight: An Italian Porketta, cheese ravioli with pesto sauce, caprese salad, a side of olives and a nice red Italian wine.