I find it so satisfying when I can cook a good meal without needing to consult a recipe. You know what I mean – grabbing some food from the fridge and the pantry and just whipping something up. Granted, I’m generally limited to pasta and a jar sauce sans recipe, but still.
The other night I decided to make chicken parm. I have plenty of recipes for chicken parm. Who doesn’t? I don’t know if I was tapping into some excess ambition, or if I was just inspired by laziness, but for whatever reason, I chose to forego the recipes and do it on my own. (Okay, so it was probably laziness. Sometimes the effort involved in opening up a cookbook is just so daunting!)
Laziness may have been my first motivation, but ambition quickly took over. I got my second wind. Even though the meal plan was pretty straightforward (chicken parm with a side of pasta, and a garden salad), and I could probably very easily phone it in, I wasn’t going to half ass it. No, I was going in whole ass on this one.
First I started with the sauce. While there was a jar of shelf stable marinara in the cupboard, I made my own by sautéing some minced garlic with Italian seasoning in olive oil before adding a 28 ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes and a teaspoon of kosher salt. I let it simmer for a half hour and then crushed the tomatoes with a potato masher before letting it simmer for another thirty minutes. The result was a chunky, rustic and flavorful homemade sauce. I like using the whole tomatoes instead of the crushed ones because – in my humble opinion – they give the sauce a much fresher flavor.
Then I made the pasta. And I don’t mean opened the box. I mean made the pasta. B gave me a pasta extruder attachment for my KitchenAid mixer for Christmas, and I had picked up some semolina flour at Whole Foods earlier in the week. And you know what that means? Fresh rigatoni was on the menu!
And for the chicken… Sticking to the “from scratch” theme here, it would have been fitting to have that freshly killed bird that B and his friend Gregg, well, um, handled a while back, but I had to settle for grocery store chicken. Hey, at least it was organic. I seasoned a pound of cutlets with salt and pepper, dredged in flour, then egg and breaded with some Italian seasoned breadcrumbs. I thought about using panko, but sometimes you just need the old fashioned choice.
I browned the chicken on both sides in some garlic infused olive oil, and then added 3/4 of the sauce to the skillet. I topped the chicken with some shredded parmesan, a little bit of mozzarella (because there was just a little bit in the refrigerator) and then added some more parm. I let the chicken simmer and the cheese melt while the rigatoni was boiling away.
Once the pasta was done, I tossed it in the remaining sauce and plated the meal. I wish I had remembered to take a picture. It was a beautiful dish. And even better, it was a delicious one.
Somewhere along the way I threw together a simple garden salad, but I’m not going to brag about the successful combination of lettuce, onion and tomato.
Okay, so I have to admit that the pasta wasn’t the world’s best. A box of Barilla would have been better. It was a little thick, and some of the pieces stuck together as I removed them from the extruder. I separated them at first, but it quickly became too difficult to keep up with the machine so I gave up and settled on some double-wide pieces. But you know what? It was good enough and the reward of making it from scratch made all the difference in the world.
(And the leftovers tasted just as good the next day!)
The reward for all this ambition? A recipe free version of a favorite dish that was better than any documented instructions I’ve ever tried before. As B said, this one’s going into the rotation.
No comments:
Post a Comment