Boneless Chicken Breasts with Mustard Sauce

Ingredients:

2 to 3 chicken boneless chicken breasts

½ cup bread crumbs

¼ cup grated parmesan cheese

1 egg

2 Tbl flour mixed with black pepper and ½ tsp cracked red pepper

2 Tbl olive oil

½ cup white wine

1 Tbl good quality mustard

Juice from ½ lemon

1 Tbl of soft butter

Chopped parsley

Wash and pat dry the chicken breasts. You’ll need three plates or flat soup bowls (sorry about that). Combine the bread crumbs and parmesan on one plate. Break up the egg with a fork and put it on the second plate. Put the flour and peppers on the third plate.

Heat the olive oil in a nonstick frying pan over medium heat. Dredge the chicken through the flour and then the egg and shake off any excess. Put it into the bread crumb mixture. Make sure that the coating adheres to the chicken. Place in the frying pan and cook on both sides until golden and cooked through.

Remove the chicken breasts from the pan, add the white wine, and bring to a boil. Add the mustard and lemon juice and cook until well combined. Remove from the heat, add the soft butter, and swirl in the pan. Pour sauce over the chicken breasts and sprinkle with chopped parsley.

I serve this chicken dish with carrot salad(http://twolittlekitchens.blogspot.com/p/definitely-not-peanut-butter-and-jelly.html) and tabouli (http://twolittlekitchens.blogspot.com/2012/04/tabouli-lebanese-way.html) for an easy warm weather meal.

This recipe was adapted from a marthastewart.com recipe.

Couscous with Fennel and Chickpea

(c) Emily Ho and The Kitchn

I've been making variations of this dish for dinner and taking the leftovers for lunch quite a bit.  It's quick and easy, so perfect for late dinners on the fly.

Sometimes I do not have all the ingredients on hand so I substitute.  I generally use that larger couscous grain that in the US is called Israeli Couscous and in Lebanon is called Moghrabieh (or some spelling variation thereof) because I like it better than regular couscous.  Also, I almost never have orange zest so I usually go without that and use more lemon in its place.  I often add leeks or onions just to give it a little more bulk, and since it's me, I alway add wine.  Obviously.

Anyway, this would make a great side dish as well so enjoy!

(Recipe care of www.thekitchn.com)

Couscous With Chickpeas, Fennel, and Citrus

Serves 2-4
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 1/2 cups (or 1 15-ounce can) cooked and drained chickpeas
10 Kalamata olives, halved and pitted
Zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
Zest and juice of 1 orange
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup instant couscous

1 large fennel bulb with fronds
3 tablespoons olive oil, divided

Cut trimmed fennel into 1/4-inch thick wedges.

Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add fennel and cook, stirring occasionally, until tender and caramelized, about 10-15 minutes. Add coriander, chickpeas, olives, and lemon juice to pan and stir to combine. Continue to cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally.

(Then, optional) Juice the orange into a liquid measuring cup and top off with water to make 1 1/2 cups of liquid. Add liquid to a small saucepan along with 1 tablespoon olive oil, orange zest, lemon zest, and salt. Bring to a boil and stir in couscous. Cover, remove from heat, and let stand for at least 5 minutes.

To serve, fluff couscous grains with a fork and spread on a dish. Spoon chickpeas and fennel over couscous and garnish with fennel fronds.

Sunday Night Dinner: Tomato Sauce Using Fresh Tomatoes

Pasta with Tomato Sauce is my go-to dinner on days that I am feeling lazy, but I usually make it with canned tomatoes. It’s easier and finding tomato skin in my pasta really gets on my nerves.

There are those times, however, when you’ve just returned home from the other side of the world, are slightly jet-lagged, and buy way too much food on your first trip to the supermarket. That was me on Friday, and one of the things that I bought on a whim was a package of seven small hot-house grown and slightly under-ripe plum (aka Roma) tomatoes.

Plum tomatoes, unless really fresh and ripe, are not great as salad fare goes. They aren’t all that sweet and never really reach a state of melting in your mouth and being totally delicious. Consequently, I almost never buy them fresh. For cooked fare, however, plum tomatoes are perfect. They are give sauces body and are flavorful when stewed.

After my Friday shopping bonanza, I thought making sauce from scratch would be a good way to use up my tomatoes on something that could feed me for a few days.

I make a lot of tomato sauce. One large batch is endlessly combinable with all sorts of foods and can feed you in an un-repetitive manner for days.

Some things I like to add when eating tomato sauce with pasta:

*Chicken, Shrimp, or Clams
*Sauteed Zucchini
*Olives and/or Capers

Some non-pasta dishes in which I use tomato sauce:

*Chicken parmesan
*Baked fish fillet with tomato sauce (I do variations on this theme.)
*As sauce for homemade pizza
*As a base for tomato soup – I sometimes combine leftover sauce with vegetable stock and simmered vegetables

I also season my sauce differently at different times of the year. In the winter I favor richer herbs like rosemary and thyme, whereas in the summer I like fresher-tasting herbs like basil or parsley.

The Recipe

7 small plum tomatoes
3 cloves of garlic
½ a large yellow onion
½ a red pepper
White wine
Salt, pepper
Herbs to taste

*These are the proportions that I used but it is just as easy to make a larger batch if there are two of you hoping to eat for a few days. These proportions made about three hearty servings for me.

Peeling the Tomatoes

This always seems like it is going to be a major process but is actually relatively quick and easy. Just boil up some water (I used the same saucepan I was planning to use for the sauce to save some sink space). Once the water is hot, cut a shallow slit into the skin of each tomato and place it into the pot.





After a few seconds, the tomato skin will start to loosen. When that happens, use a slatted spoon to take the tomatoes out of the pot and set them in a bowl to cool.

Once they are cool enough to handle, the skin comes right off!








The Sauce


While I was waiting for my tomatoes to cool, I diced my onions, red pepper, and garlic. I cut them relatively small for this recipe so that they would cook faster.

Then I poured some olive oil into the pot (just enough to coat the bottom), set it to medium heat, waited until the oil was hot, then added the onions, followed soon after by the red pepper and garlic.

Once the onions and peppers had cooked down a little, I diced and added the tomatoes. (They can be chopped to any size, depending on how chunky you like your sauce. I was in the mood for something uniform and smooth so I made my pieces small.)

Once all the vegetables had been added I peppered the mixture again, then let it simmer for a while on low-medium heat. Once some of the liquid had cooked off I added some rosemary, covered the pot, then let the sauce cook for for about 30 minutes on low. This softened any of the vegetables that were not yet tender and deepened the flavor.

When I uncovered the sauce I added some wine. I generally add red wine to tomato sauce but I only had white, so I went with it. Then I added a touch of balsamic vinegar too just because I thought it would taste good (it did!).

When it was done I served the sauce with pasta and added some fresh mozzarella for general deliciousness reasons. The mozzarella melts into the sauce and becomes stringy and delicious.

I put the leftover sauce into a covered pyrex bowl in the fridge because I planned on using it the next day. If you aren't sure when you'll be using the sauce, you can always freeze it.

Bon Appetit!

Risotto Unveiled

(c) A Chica Bakes

Risotto is the kind of mystery food that one generally orders at a restaurant, commenting on the complicated flavors while eschewing the idea that it may share similarities with less complicated fare like macaroni and cheese. It’s an “eating out” dish, if you will. A dish for which the secret to successful execution is carefully guarded by a society of elderly Italian women in a region outside of Naples that is only safe to travel to with mob protection.

I lived under this impression for years. I was happy in this bubble.

Then, a few months ago, a friend and I were broke, hungry, without much in the way of kitchenware, and sitting next to an unused box of arborio rice. Using a Claire Robinson recipe as an outline and adding a few flourishes along the way, our desperation drove us to unwittingly crack the mystery of risotto, and life has never been the same.

It turns out that risotto is not only makeable by layman like us, but is a great dish for the kitchen-limited. It requires a lot of attention but not much in the way of pots or pans, skills, or experience. All you’ll need to pull this recipe off is a small pot to heat the stock in, a large skillet, and something to stir with.

And what we turned out wasn’t just delicious, it was authentic. Italian grandmothers everywhere are…jealous? Impressed? Angry? Well, maybe not, but they are certainly on notice.

L and B’s Simple Mushroom Risotto
(an ingredients list, with measurements for you math-lovers, is below)

*We started by heating up about 5 cups of chicken broth.

*The recipe called for dried porcini mushrooms, but our local supermarket doesn’t have much in the way of selection so we purchased mixed mushrooms instead and used the stock to rehydrate them. It took about for 15 minutes.

*Then we diced an onion then sautéed it in a little butter until just before it started to brown.

*We put the onions aside, then added half a stick of butter to the pan.

*After the butter started to brown, we added a cup and a half of arborio rice to the butter and stirred until it got even browner.

*Neither of us were sure what stage of brownness we were ideally looking for, but at a certain point, once the brownness of the butter and rice was undeniable, we declared it ready and chopped and added our mushrooms, the onions we had sautéed earlier, and a tad more white wine than was suggested (lets say it wont hurt to add an extra ½ cup).

This is when the concoction began to smell good. We lowered the heat to a simmer and sat around patting ourselves on the back while the liquid cooked off.

Once the wine had completely cooked out, we began adding the chicken broth a ½ cup at a time, stirring continuously and allowing all the liquid to cook off fully before adding more.

Salt and Pepper were added. Mostly pepper.

*Once the rice grains were soft and we were out of chicken stock, we added parmesan cheese (in a completely unmeasured fashion), then continued to stir until we were so hungry we had to eat some. At that point, we decided it was probably done.

The recipe made about 4 hearty servings. B and I ate a million servings each, then put the rest into the fridge and reheated it later on the stove, adding a little extra liquid so it wouldn’t dry out.

Ingredients:
1 Onion
½ Stick of Butter (4 tbs.)
.5 – 1 oz. Dried Porcini or Mixed Mushrooms (you can use fresh)
1.5 cups Arborio Rice (dry)
5 cups of Chicken Broth
½ Cup White Wine
½ Cup Parmesan or Pecorino Romano Cheese
Salt and Pepper to Taste

Props to Claire Robinson for the original recipe.  And to B for being my partner in crime.