I had a lot of tomatoes from my CSA and friends' gardens, so I knew it was time to try making my own tomato sauce for the first time.
I decided to not use a recipe at all, and just put a few ingredients that I knew would work together and see how it turned out. It worked pretty well!
Ingredients:
- Tomatoes. I had what amounted to about 2.5 quarts, I think. Various types.
- 1 onion
- Garlic. I used 5 or 6 cloves.
- 1 6 oz can Contadina Tomato Paste (only brand I know that has no ingredients other than TOMATOES)
- Extra Virgin Olive Oil
- Fresh Basil
- Salt
- Pepper
- 2 boneless chicken breast halves
- flour
- breadcrumbs
- milk (I used skim, and it worked just fine!)
- Freshly-grated parmesan cheese
Here's what I did:
Chopped up all the tomatoes as small as I could. I kept all seeds and skin, and only discarded the stems, bad spots, and a couple of under-ripe bits if they were too hard.
Heat a few Tablespoons of EVOO in the bottom of a wide sauce pan or skilled (I used my chef's pan). Add all the tomatoes, juice and all. Add lots of salt and plenty of pepper, to taste.
Once the tomatoes have started to head up, add the tomato paste and stir to dissolve it.
While that bubbles, chop up the onion and garlic. Heat up a little more EVOO in a skillet (you can use the same skillet for the chicken in a few minutes). Sautee the onions & garlic separately until they're fully cooked and slightly browned, then dump them into the bigger pot with the tomatoes.
This is probably a good time to pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees.
While the onions & garlic are cooking and the tomatoes continue to simmer, prepare the chicken:
Rinse & dry each piece. Pound them a little so they're a bit thinner - mine weren't too thin, just about 1/2 or 3/4" - it doesn't matter, I just wanted to flatten them out a bit.
Use two salad plates and cover each with a few heaping Tablespoons of flour and breadcrumbs, respectively. Add some salt and pepper to each plate (unless your breadcrumbs already have salt!). Put some milk in a shallow bowl.
Dip each piece of meat into the flour (flip it to cover all surfaces), then into the milk quickly, then in the breadcrumbs (again turning to coat fully). This should give you a thin but complete layer of breading.
Once the onions & garlic are done cooking and have been added to the tomatoes, put a little more EVOO into the now-empty skillet, heat it, and add the chicken breasts. Cook for a few minutes on each side until they're nicely browned, crispy, and cooked through. Set aside until the sauce is ready.
The sauce is ready whenever you think it's ready: I just cooked it until it was a bit thicker and reduced, pleasantly chunky but still with plenty of liquid, and obviously very cooked because the tomatoes were all mushy and it looked like, well, tomato sauce! At this point I tossed a bunch of fresh basil into the pot (stack a bunch of basil leaves, roll them up, and slice thinnly), tasted it, and added a bit more salt and pepper.
Once the sauce is ready to go, spread a generous layer of sauce in the bottom of a glass baking dish (I used a small dish since I only had 2 pieces of chicken).
Grate some fresh parmesan onto both chicken breasts and place that side down in the sauce in the baking dish. Generously grate more parmesan over the chicken, put a little dollop of sauce on top of each piece, and pop it in the oven, uncovered, for 15-20 minutes or until cheese is all melted and sauce is bubbley.
Scoop onto dinner plates, including all the sauce in the baking dish, add some crusty bread, and enjoy!
I made way more sauce than I used for the actual Chicken Parmesan. I've never made either fresh tomato sauce OR Chicken Parmesan before, so it was a fun evening!
The rest of the sauce is in my fridge, in one container for me and another container to go to someone who gave me some of the tomatoes.
Was the recipe easy to follow? I wish I had thought through the steps in a little bit more detail before I dove in, but it all worked out in the end, so yeah.
Did it taste good? Extra-delicious because I knew all the tomatoes were grown within 30 miles of my house using no chemicals at all! The EVOO probably didn't hurt either.
Would you make it again? Definitely. I anticipate getting tons more tomatoes over the next month, so the sauce will probably become a frequent task. I plan to put it over pasta, other meats, and hopefully a homemade pizza in the near future! We eat a lot of chicken, though, so this will very likely be repeated in the near future. Other than chopping up all the tomatoes, this was really quite easy to make.
I was thinking a bell pepper wouldn't be amiss in the sauce, and some white wine would be another great addition - next time I'm planning to use the wine to deglaze the pan after cooking the onions, garlic, and chicken. Adding all that crispy goodness with the wine to the sauce would take the flavor to a whole new level!
It's a good thing there's sauce leftover to look forward to for dinner this weekend.
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