Chicken Parmesan with Fresh Tomato Sauce

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.

Mushroom Risotto

Very simple this time, I used this recipe with very few changes:

I used a 1 lb box of arborio rice plus 1 qt (4 cups) of mushroom stock
For the mushrooms I used two containers from Giant: one of sliced baby bellas, and the other a mix of crimini/oyster/shitake.

The mushroom stock didn't come in low sodium, so I just didn't add any more salt, but next time I'd stick with chicken stock. I just wanted to try out the mushroom stock, I've been eyeing it up at Wegman's for months.

All other portions I kept identical, including the 1/2 c dry white wine, so no need to reduce any other ingredients just because I used less rice. I also used 3 shallots, and I wish I had added a couple cloves of garlic.

I did follow the recipe's suggestion of removing the mushrooms once they were soft, and I'm glad I did: the rice was then in with just the shallots, so it had more chance to get creamy and thick. I actually removed the mushrooms to the same little saucepan as the stock, which I heated over the lowest flame possible so that it was just below simmering the entire time, but hot so that it didn't lower the temp of the rice every time I ladled more in. Then I just used a ladle to scoop broth (but no mushrooms if I could help it) into the rice gradually, one or two ladles at a time.

I did use less butter at the end, since I had less rice, and because it was already delicious and didn't need that much added richness (or fat!).

Chiang Mer

My sister and her friend have had this dish twice at Spice Island in Pittsburgh (the restaurant owned by East Side Girl's hubby), and they both love it even though it is much more spicy than they prefer. I recently bought a jar of mild curry paste from the Indian secion at Wegman's and decided to try to reproduce the dish, and I did pretty well with Hannah's help!

Spice Island's menu describes the dish like this:
Chiang Mai Noodles
Wheat noodles in red curry sauce with minced chicken, hot peppers, carrot, mushroom, onion, and cilantro.

I was going for not so spicy, and I didn't have mushrooms or cilantro, so here's what I did:

Ingredients:
- 1/2 lb of spaghetti, cooked & drained
- 1 big or 2 small boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized pieces
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 carrot, diced
- mild curry paste
- tomato paste
Optional:
- sliced mushrooms
- fresh cilantro
- 1 can crushed tomato, drained

Directions:
Cook the spaghetti

While I waited for the water to boil etc. I made the rest:
- Heat a little oil in a pan (the curry paste is oil-based, so only use just enough to cook the veggies)
- Sautee the onion and carrot in the oil until soft
- Add the chicken and sautee until cooked through
- Add 4 generous Tablespoons of mild curry paste
- Add a hearty squirt of tomato paste (about 2 Tablespoons)
- Continue cooking until sauce is heated and everything is done
- Add the cooked, drained spaghetti and stir it around with the heat still on low until everything is mixed and delicious-looking
- Scoop it onto a plate and enjoy!
The above made two perfect medium-large helpings, one for me and one for my hubby.

The "mild" curry paste I had still packed plenty of bite for my tastes, so I wouldn't add any hot pepper, but would definitely add mushrooms and cilantro if I plan ahead better next time. However, the dish was delicious without them.

The other thing I will definitely change next time is to use a little less curry paste and add a whole small can of tomato paste, and perhaps also a small can of crushed tomatoes (drained as much as possible). It was delicious, but I think it would have been even better with some more tomato, even if I had to cook it longer to get rid of the extra liquid. If adding the crushed tomatoes is going to give me a lot of extra liquid, I would just brown the chicken quickly at first but not cook it completely so that it could cook the rest of the way as the sauce simmered and reduced.

I hope to make this again soon with the added ingredients, so I'll let you know how it turns out then!

Baked Chicken & Carrots with Mirepoix Rice

I threw this meal together out of some veggies I needed to use up, and it turned out really delicious!

I wanted to bake the carrots, so I looked up recipes for that and liked the sound of a simple one using cumin & thyme, so I went with that. For the rice I used the classic French trio of 2 parts onion, 1 part celery, 1 part carrots as the base and then just cooked the rice like a pilaf. So this is two separate dishes, but it made a nice complete meal:

Baked Chicken & Carrots

Ingredients:

- 1 bag of baby carrots
- 2 T butter
- Chicken breasts, one per every 2 people
- Cumin, Thyme, Pepper, and Salt to taste
- 1/4 c Dry vermouth

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Dump the carrots (reserve about 10 carrots if you're making the rice below) into your favorite deep-dish casserole or dutch oven (that's what I used)
Sprinkle in salt, a few generous grinds of black pepper, lots of cumin, and plenty of thyme. Toss this all together a bit to coat the carrots with the spices.
Stick a pat of butter or two in the bottom of the dish, beneath the carrots.
Cut your chicken breasts into serving sizes: I had some freakishly huge chicken breasts, so I cut one into three pieces and served that to myself and two girlfriends, and we had plenty to eat. You might want to just cut your breasts into two pieces, half a breast per person.
Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper on both sides and toss them in on top of the carrots
Pour in just enough vermouth to put some liquid on the bottom of the pot, about 1/4 to 1/3 cups.
Cover with a lid or aluminium foil and toss that puppy into the oven for 40 minutes. In the mean time, you can make your rice!

Mirepoix Rice

Ingredients:

- 1 (16 oz) carton of low sodium, fat free chicken broth
- 1 1/3 C Basmati rice, or another long-grain aromatic rice (Kasmati, Jasmati, Jasmine...)
- 2 small onions
- some carrots
- 1 to 2 stalks of celery
- 2 T butter
- salt, pepper

Mirepoix, as I re-learned a few days ago thanks to the internet, is traditionally 2 parts onion, one part celery, and one part carrot, finely chopped and sauteed in butter, and used as the base for stocks, soups, stews, and whatever else you want to cook on top of it. Since I had all three ingredients on hand from the butternut squash soup I made last week, I needed to use them.

Chop up your onion first
Chop celery (or carrots) next until you have about half as much as the onion
Chop up the carrots (or celery) until you have the same amount as the previous step
Melt about 2 T butter over medium-low heat in a sautee pan with a good lid
Add your veggies and season with salt and pepper to taste
Sautee veggies in butter until they're nice and soft
Add your rice (yes, dry rice, no broth yet!) and stir it all up so the rice gets all mixed with the veggies and coated with the butter.
Sautee the rice with everything else until the rice turns translucent and gives off a nutty scent.
Add the chicken broth, turn heat to high, and bring to a boil.
Stir once, cover, and reduce heat to very low to simmer. The time for simmering should come from the rice packaging - my huge bag of basmati rice has me simmer for 10 minutes, remove from heat and sit (never take off the lid!!) for at least another 5 minutes. So chances are you need to simmer for at least 10 minutes, maybe more, and then give it plenty of time to sit, and never never never remove the lid. This is all MUCH easier to do without burning your rice if you have a gas stove; if you have electric, you might want to actually turn on another burner to low heat and move the pot to that burner once you start to boil, otherwise it will take too long to cool to a simmer.

The whole rice process should be pretty easy to finish within the 40 minutes the chicken and carrots take in the oven, so right around the time your rice is done sitting for 5 minutes and you take off the lid to fluff it, you can pull out the dutch oven and cut open a piece of chicken to make sure it's cooked all the way through. If it is, then you're ready to serve dinner! The juice in the bottom of the dutch oven is great over the rice, and if you're like me you just put the rice in the middle of your plate and the chicken and carrots right on top!

My favorite thing about this meal was how rich it tasted. I only used 2 Tablespoons of butter in each dish, plus the minimal fat from the chicken itself, so I think the richness must have come from the mirepoix and spices. It was so good, and quite easy with the chicken and carrots all in one pot! If you're used to making minute rice (yuck!), you might think the rice is cumbersome, but I've come to love rice so much that this cooking method is the norm for me and I don't think it's difficult at all, although I made rice a lot less when I had an electric stove. As long as you have gas and you remember to set your timer, you don't have to worry about the rice at all once the lid is on.