Chicken Piccata Pasta

Man, I love pasta. I eat pasta at least three times a week, and not just with red sauce. I can take anything in my refrigerator and make some kind of pasta-based dinner around it. And recently, while flipping through Giada De Laurentiis’s Everyday Italian, I decided that nearly all of the recipes in this book would be more interesting if they were turned into pasta dishes. So I decided to start with Chicken Piccata.

Giada’s Chicken Piccata recipe is in the chapter on Cutlets. I’m assuming it’s meant to be served as a big slab of meat, maybe with a side of polenta and some kind of vegetable. But as you can probably tell if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, I’m not really a big-slab-of-meat kind of girl. I tend to prefer meals in which all of the important food components can be mixed together and served in a bowl, which is probably why pasta is such a favorite. So I decided to add some zucchini to the mix and turn this big-slab-of-meat meal into a quick, easy, and tasty pasta dinner.

Updated! Herbed Ricotta-Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Sauce Aurore

When I first started this here blog, I cooked up a fancy dinner for my lady friend Crystal that subsequently stood out in my mind as one of the best things I’d ever made. It was the first time that I had a vision for dinner that didn’t come straight from the pages of a cookbook or a glossy magazine. I mixed tons of fresh herbs into some ricotta, stuffed it inside of some chicken, and topped the chicken with a light, tomato cream sauce that pulled it all together, and this recipe became my go to suggestion whenever anyone asked me for something easy but impressive to serve for dinner. But the original pictures I took for the post? Not so impressive. I always intended to make this again, with more appealing photographs, because I would hate to think this recipe would be shunned because of its seeming unattractiveness. Well finally, last week, I did it.

Chicken Marbella, Three Ways

I have been saving this recipe to post to my new blog, but setting up the new blog has been taking longer than I anticipated, and this chicken was so good, and so versatile, that I decided I couldn’t wait to share it any longer. The recipe comes from The Silver Palate Cookbook, and was apparently one of the first dishes to be offered at the Silver Palate food store. I discovered it only after reading about the death of Sheila Lukins, one of the founders of The Silver Palate, and I’m glad I did. I had the impression that The Silver Palate Cookbook was a throwback to the 80s and had never thought to pick it up. Now that I know better, I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy and try more.

I also can’t wait to cook more with prunes. I know, sounds crazy, but I was pleasantly surprised by the sweet richness they added to this chicken. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover prunes are nothing more than dried plums. I suspect if they were called dried plums instead of prunes they wouldn’t have such a geriatric reputation.

Pollo al ajillo

The last month has been crazy. Between finishing graduate school, preparing for a job interview, and traveling to California and to Washington within the space of a week, I hardly had a chance to breathe. Then I came back from Washington (site of aforementioned job interview) and, before I had even unpacked, I was offered the job and was immediately thrown into the reality of moving across the country. So it looks like the next month will be crazy, too.

During all of that craziness, this recipe sat patiently on my desk, just waiting for me to find, not just the time to prepare food of any kind, but an occasion that deserved it. That occasion came last week when Mr. X and I finally had a Saturday evening at home that involved me not doing homework and him not doing work. Amazing. As was this dish.

Chicken with Green Olives, Orange, and Sherry

At the beginning of every month, I go through my back issues of Bon Appetit for that month and mark recipes that look interesting. I take note of things I want to try, and am always amused to find that something that looked great to me a few years ago no longer seems intriguing, and something I had no interest in the first time through the magazine suddenly stands out. This is one of those recipes: The January 2005 issue featured this Chicken with Green Olives, Orange, and Sherry in the FastEasyFresh column, and I breezed right by it four years ago and never gave it a second thought. And I didn’t know what I was missing.

Mahogany Glazed Chicken

I have a tendency to go through my printed recipe folder, pull out things I want to try, stick them on the refrigerator, and completely forget about them. Our refrigerator is pretty much covered in random stuff that none of us ever looks at, so I suppose it’s easy to see how recipes could be so easily forgotten. And every now and then one of us will go on a kitchen cleaning spree, and my tacked up recipes will be taken down and put on the counter, which is a nice reminder to cook them (and also not to clutter up our common areas with my random stuff).

This one had been stuck to the refrigerator for I don’t even know how many months before it was brought to my attention again, and I finally decided to make it. I originally saw something similar on one of those random cooking competition shows on the Food Network. I think it was a chicken competition, or something equally boring, but the winning recipe, Mahogany Broiled Chicken with Smoky Lime Sweet Potatoes and Cilantro Chimichurri, was very intriguing. Of course, true to form, I didn’t end up cooking the winning version but rather this Eating Well version, which is completely different, so, um, yeah, that’s pretty much how things operate around here.

Chicken Braid? Yes, Chicken Braid.

My housemate, Hilary, gave me this recipe a few months ago, and I made it twice in three weeks. Those who know me know that I rarely repeat a recipe, no matter how good it is, so twice in three weeks is really saying something. Hilary says her mom got the recipe from Pampered Chef, but this recipe can be found all over the interwebs, with very little variation. I suspect it may originally have been one of those Pillsbury package recipes, as every version I’ve seen calls for packaged crescent rolls.

I did not use Pillsbury crescent rolls, though. I used puff pastry, and it turned out splendidly, perhaps, dare I say, even better? Key point, though: the first time I made it I used Trader Joe’s puff pastry, and the second time, Pepperidge Farm, and the Trader Joe’s was a far better choice. The sheet of pastry was a better size, it thawed more quickly, and the flavor was much more buttery and light. Just so you know.

Moroccan-style Sweet and Smoky Chicken, as advertised

Recipes from friends, recipes from family. Recipes with stories, recipes with memories. Recipes from food bloggers and food magazines and food television. Recipes from ads? I usually get recipes from any source imaginable, but I think this chicken dinner might be the first time I’ve cooked something from an ad in a food magazine (and Green Bean Casserole doesn’t count, because in my mind it’s a recipe that my mom created, not a soup company). In fact, I’m such an anti-advertising fanatic that I’ve mostly trained myself not to see advertising, or at least to pointedly ignore it when I do see it. But flipping through an old issue of Bon Appetit, my eye was caught by a McCormick ad featuring this recipe for Sweet and Smoky Chicken, and I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to make it.

I will have you know, though, that no McCormick spices were used in the preparation of this meal.

Quintessential Summer Dinner: BBQ Chicken, Potato Salad, Corn, and Biscuits

I told you I ate a lot of great food in San Diego. The best part of my trip was being able to enjoy awesome meals with my family and friends. There is something perfect, something I miss everyday living here in Boston, about sitting at a table with people I love, sharing food and conversation. I grew up in a house where family dinners were important: I remember waiting every night for dinner until everyone was home from work and school and practice and whatnot before we sat down to eat, and now that I’m an adult (ahem, ha ha) I realize how great, and perhaps uncommon, it is that my parents brought us up like that. So, thanks ma and pa. You guys are rad.

The last night I was in San Diego, my aunt and uncle and their two kids came for dinner, and we cooked up this way-too-classic summer dinner: barbecue grilled chicken, corn on the cob, German potato salad, and buttery biscuits. The only thing missing, perhaps, was apple pie. But we had vanilla ice cream with strawberries instead, which is pretty perfectly summery itself. And this dinner was truly a group effort. I made the barbecue sauce and biscuits, Mom made the potato salad, my brother’s grilled the chicken and corn, and Dad entertained us all, the goofball.

Chicken Pasta Provencal, a new kitchen staple

At the beginning of the summer, I vowed to cook at least one meal a week from entirely local ingredients. I have completely failed in this endeavor. I’ve only even been to the farmer’s market once. Every year, when spring rolls around, I get so excited about fresh, local produce but then fail to take advantage. I am one of those people for whom convenience is everything, it’s true, and finding locally grown and produced food takes time and effort.

The closest I came to an entirely local meal was this pasta dish, and, well, the chicken and the pasta are not exactly from around here. The produce, though? The most brilliant yellow summer squash I’ve ever seen, a perfect heirloom tomato, fresh basil, a sprig of rosemary, all of it from Massachusetts farms and all of it kind of unbelievable. No, this dinner was not 100% local. I’m just not that disciplined. What it was, though, was delicious and possibly my new favorite summer meal.