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I've really been grappling with what to call this particular recipe. In fact, my indecision has been so crippling that it's prevented me from posting this dish for close to two months. For all intents and purposes this is a chicken salad, but the last thing I want you to think of when you hear the title is mayo-and-egg-laden typical chicken salad because this bears about as much resemblance to the American picnic classic as, well, a nice Cabernet to Boone's Farm.
So for lack of inspiration (I guess I used all my inspiration on actually developing the recipe) I have dubbed it Not Yer Mama's Chicken Salad. Like I said, you won't find mayo or relish or eggs here. Rather, you'll find a tangy, refreshing, and light mustard and kalamata olive dressing over marinated chicken, complemented by texture provided by napa cabbage and radicchio. Stuff it in a warm pita, serve it atop a bed of lettuce and wild rice, put it aside pita chips as a dip, or, possibly best of all, serve it in between two slices of homemade olive-rosemary bread. Whatever you choose, prepare to take your taste buds on a adventure!
Click here for the recipe for "Not Yer Mama's Chicken Salad" »
You may be sad because summer has come to an end, taking with it delightful foods like nectarines, plums, berries, and locally grown vegetables like greens, cauliflower, chard, beets, and carrots.
But don't fret! Fall has its place in a foodie's heart because it brings delights like root vegetables, butternut squash, pumpkins, an untold number of apple varieties, Bartlett pears, and pomegranates.
I recently celebrated fall by having a harvest dinner (suggested by my most wise and venerable husband). On the menu was a roasted pear salad with candied walnuts, blue cheese, and homemade balsamic vinaigrette, cabernet-glazed shallots, butternut squash risotto with wilted spinach and toasted pine nuts, sauteed pork tenderloin with an apple-sage sauce, and stuffed baked Jonagold apples with vanilla bean ice cream for dessert. I love this menu -- it's so autumn-y with its warm, subtle flavors and unifying themes. Sage and apple are present in many of the dishes but are different and subtle enough to not get old or tiring. And as my guests pointed out last night, there's plenty of booze in every dish! So dig in and get to love autumn as much as I do, and share it with some good friends too.
Lasagna - there is so much to love about it. It's cheesy, it's gooey, it's a meal in itself, it's comfort food. It's easy to make to boot. This was something I could make in my dorm kitchen, following the recipe on the back of the Barilla box. What that recipe lacked in finesse it made up for in cheese. Not that we minded - we were college students starved for a homemade meal, and so we always had fun popping this into the ovens in the dorm kitchens, opening a bottle of wine, and making a meal such that we were the envy of most dorm residents.
Now that I'm out of college though, that cheese-laden flavor-lacking thoroughly Americanized version isn't going to cut it anymore. And that Souffer stuff? Forgetaboutit. Why oh why would you buy something like that when lasagna is like the easiest thing to make ever??? Anyway, I'd been looking for a good recipe for a several years until this winter when we had a dinner party at my swim coach's house and my friend Ginger brought a tray of the most fantastic lasagna. It had just the right amount of cheese and wasn't greasy and had some substantial herbs to it, which is really something that most recipes lack. So what did I do? I asked her for the recipe, of course.
"Oooh, I don't know, I'll have to ask my mom about it!" Apparently the lasagna recipe is akin to a state secret - Ginger's mom worked really hard to develop the recipe (it shows!) and only gave it to her daughters under the condition that they would keep it as proprietary information. Lucky for me though, Carol agreed that it was ok for Ginger to give me the recipe because I had shared my family's pumpkin cookie with her. Totally a great swap, if you ask me. And in case you're wondering, yes, I do have permission to share this recipe on this blog! I've modified it only a little bit, because the core premise of the recipe is so solid. It uses cottage cheese instead of ricotta, which I think is a really great idea because it's really tough to find good ricottas in the States. I absolutely love the sauce that you make for the recipe, and it's fantastic with both either and turkey Italian sausages. I did substitute dried Italian herbs for dried basil because basil's flavor is so volatile in the presence of heat and the dried version retains so little of the fresh's flavor - but I just added in the fresh basil later in the recipe. The overall effect of the recipe is a way-less heavy version of the typical lasagna, but still retains all of the flavor that you want.
Thank you so much, Carol, for sharing this recipe with me! You did an awesome job creating this lasagna and I really appreciate being let in on the secret!
I've been waiting to post this recipe for quite some time.
You see, you might call this dish Highly Significant.
It's so significant that I often find myself asking if Cory and I would have gotten married if it were not for this recipe.
It's one of the first things we ever cooked together, and from the point that we starting smooshing up those tomatoes with our hands, it was painfully apparent that we were meant to be.
We still cook up a batch of chicken cacciatore every time we're together. I thought it was criminal that he didn't have a copy of the recipe or The Joy of Cooking, so when he moved into his current apartment I bought him a copy the newly released 75th anniversary edition as a housewarming gift. Before I bought it for him I made sure that the recipe hadn't gotten the axe and was included in that version, but when we brought it home and we inspected it more closely we found that it calls for diced canned tomatoes, not whole tomatoes that you crush with your hands. On that alone, I've basically panned the whole edition. It's not worth buying! Find the 1997 edition! That older recipe helped Cory and I find love, and I who am I to deny anyone else that opportunity by recommending an inferior tome?
I'm going to admit upfront: my version of the classic Italian chicken is so not traditional. Every recipe I've ever seen and everyone else who's ever served it to me - including places in Italy - call for chicken parts, not chicken breasts, but when I was first learning to cook I had no clue what the heck a chicken part was. Even if I had been savvy enough, I simply didn't have the equipment to cut up a chicken and then cook it. So maybe it's for the best that I've bastardized it. I still think it's delicious, and it has the health benefits of being all-white meat.
Not everything about this recipe is 100% positive though. There is something about chicken cacciatore that makes living alone an especially bitter pill to swallow. This dish is so obviously meant to be cooked with people and then shared with people. That alone explains two of my behaviors: I always call Cory when I'm starting to crush up those tomatoes with my hands and tell him that I wish he was there with me, and whenever I'm cooking for a group people for the first time, this is the recipe I pull out. It's just too good to not share with others. It's not just the end result that's important, it's the whole process - from the first time you throw the onions and herbs in the pan and the fragrance makes everyone exclaim with delight to the times when the pan is in a long simmer and you can just sit around and enjoy the company of your companions to the first bite of that warm, earthy, wine-herbs-and-tomato chickeny goodness. Nothing says "I care" like chicken cacciatore.
