14 March 2011

Chicken Cacciatore with Homemade Pasta

If you haven't noticed yet, which is entirely possible, I like to balance days of big meals with little ones, easy meals with more complicated ones, etc. I had originally intended to make this dish yesterday, but circumstances prevented that so I made it today. My crock pot is not currently functioning due to a broken lid, so I had to do this in a pot on the stove all day, much like all other 'slow cooker' things I've been doing. I did not follow a recipe, so here is what I remember.






Coat chicken in flour. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Brown in large, high sided skillet (I don't know the correct term for this, sorry) and remove chicken. Saute an onion and a few cloves of garlic in chicken juices for a few minutes. De glaze pan with red wine, scraping up chicken bits and incorporate them into the wine. Here is where I would have done it differently had I had the correct ingredients. I added a can of diced tomatoes and a bowl of leftover tomato sauce/sun dried tomato pesto/garlic mix I had left over from the naan pizza. Therefore, I'm not sure exactly how much tomato sauce mixture went in, but you can gauge for yourself. I did not have any fresh peppers, so instead I added about a quarter of a bag of frozen pepper stir fry mix (love this!). I also had a stalk of kale sitting on the counter that I did not use in Heidi's and Piper's omelet that morning, so I broke it up very finely and threw it in (didn't want to waste it :) ). Then I put the chicken back in, added more salt and pepper, oregano, basil, garlic powder and onion powder, brought it to a boil, reduced to a simmer and let it sit for about 8 hours.

I figured since dinner was already taken care of, it wouldn't be too much trouble to make my own pasta, right? Unfortunately, it ended up being a bit more involved than I had planned, but it still worked.
I followed a pretty generic pasta recipe consisting of adding two cups of flour and 1/2 tsp of salt in one bowl, beating two eggs and adding 1/3 cup water and 1 tsp of oil in another bowl, then combining them (after making a well in the flour) to make the dough. I kneaded it, let it sit for 10 minutes, rolled it out, let it sit for another 20 minutes, then rolled it to make 'linguine.' I ran into issues when some of the dough was too sticky and wouldn't unroll, so in the end I just ended up throwing them as smooshed globs of pasta into the boiling water. Everyone liked it though, so I suppose it was still a success.

No comments:

Post a Comment