Company Dinner

Once in a while I will come up with a recipe from scratch, without any help, on my own. Sometimes those recipes turn out okay, sometimes not-so-much, and sometimes they are really great.

A few weeks ago, the muse of delicious food was clearly sitting on my shoulder. This recipe is easy, quick, and makes a weeknight supper seem special. You could easily serve this when company comes over and impress everyone.

(Does anyone else remember that term from childhood books? I seem to remember reading some book that MUST have been written in the 50's about a girl named Betsy* who got married and when she and her husband moved in together after their honeymoon, he invited his boss over, and Betsy was so glad that her mother had taught her to "make one good chicken dish for company - that will become your company dinner." WTF, right? Somehow that stuck with me. Scary.)

Anyway....this could be your company dinner. It's definitely going into my repertoire.



Dena's Company Dinner (aka Dijon-Caper Chicken Cutlets)

- Chicken cutlets (as many cutlets as people you're serving -- ie, 2 cutlets for 2 people.) (A note about cutlets: you can easily make your own, or ask your butcher to cut them for you: just take a boneless, skinless chicken breast that has been in the freezer for ~15 minutes and slice it in half, horizontally and length-wise. Ie, hold your knife parallel to the cutting board and run it through the breast to make two much thinner breasts.)
- 1 cup (or so) good quality dry white wine, like Sauvignon Blanc
- 2 tbsp (or so - can you tell I eyeball this recipe?) dijon mustard
- 2 tbsp-ish lemon juice
- capers to taste (lately I've been using caper berries, which are delicious!)
- 2 tbsp-ish olive oil

Salt and pepper the chicken cutlets on one side.

Heat the olive oil in a not-nonstick pan over medium-high heat. Let it get good and hot and shimmery. Then add the cutlets to the pan, salt-&-pepper side down. Once they're in the pan, don't move them! You want them to get a nice little saute crust. Meanwhile, salt and pepper the side facing up.

Let them cook for about 3 minutes per side, depending on how thin they are and how hot your stove gets. Check on them when they're done with the second side by cutting a small slit to make sure they're cooked through.

Cook them in batches if you need to -- you don't want to crowd the pan!

When they're cooked through, remove them from the pan but don't turn the heat off! Add the wine and begin scraping up the fond (aka the yummy brown bits at the bottom) with a spatula as you deglaze the pan.

Let the wine reduce a bit, then add the lemon juice and mustard. Stir and whisk together; let simmer for a minute or so. Add capers, then turn off heat.

Pour sauce over cutlets and enjoy a gourmet meal. Delish.

I like to serve these with Winston's Roasted Cauliflower or sauteed kale and some roasted baby potatoes.



And oh yeah! This is National Delurking Week! Please come out of the quiet readership and leave a comment! :-)


* OMG I found the Betsy book. Best part of the review: "But as Betsy discovers, marriage isn't all candlelight, kisses, and roses. There's cooking, ironing, and budgeting as well--not to mention forging her career as a writer! For Betsy, the writing part comes naturally, but cooking is another matter. It's even harder than algebra--and much messier." Good god. Where did I find this to read?

Baked Ziti

This is one of those recipes that is so in my bones, I don't even remember where I originally got it from. All I know is that this is a recipe for ooey gooey warm deliciousness in a pan.

Definitely one to have around for the winter. And whenever you're watching a Godfather or Sopranos marathon. Am I the only one who craves homemade Italian food when I watch those? I see Carmela take a pan of ziti out of her fridge for the priest who's stopped by and I am like instantly drooling.

Anyway...I digress. Back to the recipe. It's like an easier lasagna, really. And the truth is that the last time I used actual ziti as the pasta in the recipe was nearly 8 years ago -- any short, tube-like pasta will do: penne, rigatoni, fusilli, whatever's easy and on hand. We actually like it best with Trader Joe's organic whole wheat fusilli, but that's just us.


Dena's Baked Ziti

1 lb. short, tubular pasta (like ziti or penne)
1 lb. ground beef (leave this out or substitute with fake meat for vegetarian version)
16 oz. mozzarella, grated
3-4 oz. parmesan, grated
4 (or more, if you're like me) garlic cloves, chopped
1 onion, finely diced
1 28 oz. can diced tomatoes
2 tbsp olive oil
dash of oregano

Preheat your oven to 450F.

Heat olive oil in skillet over medium heat. When it's shimmery and hot, add the onion and garlic and toss and let it get nice and warmed through, about 2 minutes or so.

While the onion and garlic are cooking, set the pasta to cook in boiling, salted water in a large pot.

Once the onion and garlic is very fragrant and the onion is starting to get translucent, add a bit of oregano, and after about a minute, add the ground beef and smush it with the back of a wooden spoon to break it up into small pieces. Let it brown all over.

Once it's browned, add the crushed tomatoes and stir to get everything mixed together. Let it come to a boil, then stir and bring down to a simmer. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Drain your pasta and put it back in the large pot in which it was boiled. Add the tomato-beef sauce and mix well. See -- this is why you have to make sure you use a big pot!

Add 1/4 of the mozzarella cheese to the pot and mix well so the cheese is everywhere, all melty and gooey and nice. Toss the remaining mozzarella with the parmesan so it's all mixed together well.

Transfer mixture to a 9x13 baking dish and spread it out evenly. Top with the mozzarella-parmesan cheese mixture and make sure it is evenly distributed across the top.

Pop it in the oven for about 5 minutes. Then turn the broiler on high and let it sit under the broiler for as long as it takes for the cheese to get bubbly and browned in places, but not burnt! Broilers can be tricky and finicky -- I find each one has its own temperament (so to speak), so you gotta watch it closely.

When it is browned the way you like it, remove, serve, and enjoyyyyyyyyyy. Press play on the Sopranos DVD.

Not to go on about Mark Bittman, but....

Seriously I am having a foodie-crush on this guy right now. I just read over his profile in the Observer from a little while, and I apologize if you're so over him, but I have to share this with you all:

“The grass-fed beef concept is really great,” he went on, “but if you don’t cut consumption, it doesn’t matter. There’s not enough room for grass-fed beef any more than there’s enough room for imprisoned beef.”

It’s the same with seafood. “All this farm-raised stuff, it’s crap,” he said, but he is wary of promoting wild fish. “If I tell you to go eat it, it’s gone.” Mr. Bittman said he cannot update [his 1992 cookbook] Fish because so many of the 70 species he wrote about have since disappeared.

“I have no interest in helping people becoming chefs,” Mr. Bittman said. “I have an interest in 50 percent of the people in America knowing how to cook. And whether they cook like chefs or not, I don’t care. It’s probably better if they don’t. It would be better if they cook like me, which is adequately.”

Amen to that!

A promise for Friday: I will post a recipe! And it will be something yummy. I just have to sort through my photos and see what I got on there.

The Best Food Article I've Read All Year

Okay so it's been all of 7 days in this year. But The New York Times' own Mark Bittman's* "Fresh Start for a New Year? Let's Start in the Kitchen" article would be a great one anytime of year.

Basically, Bitty breaks it down for us and tells us to start 2009 with a clean slate of a kitchen. He simply and directly tells us what we need around the kitchen, what we can get rid of, and lots of short and simple little recipes to enliven our cooking.

It is so good I almost want to print it out and pin it up.

Reading through, there's a lot he recommends that I already do, and I felt like patting myself on the back (Parmesan in our house = never the green can, always the real freshly grated kind). Yay! I win.

But then...there's also a lot I don't do, and want to explore (Beans in our house = always canned, haven't tackled dried). Shoot. I am a total slacker.

So I'm going to take his advice. I'm totally going to try using dried beans this year at some point, and try to work my way through his list and see how else I can make my kitchen a little more real and flavorful.

What about you? What recommendations do you already do? And what are you guilty of?


* For any other Bittman fans out there, this profile, "The Making of the Minimalist," in the Observer from a few weeks ago is great!

Michael Pollan on NPR's Talk of the Nation

He was on a little while ago talking about his latest book, In Defense of Food. You can listen to it online!

According to NPR's website, here is what he talked about:

In his book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan argues that in last 20 decades, real food has vanished from supermarket shelves only to be replaced by food imitations. Pollan offers pointers on getting back to basic nutrition.

I can't believe I still haven't read this one. I can't wait!