Creamy Mushroom Chicken

Here's a recipe pulled straight out of the pantry. Every so often it's a good idea to see what you have sitting around and make something from it. In this case, the jumping off point was a can of Cream of Mushroom soup. The only thing I did not already have was the mushrooms. This whole thing should take about 30 minutes.

Here's what you'll need:

1 cup sliced mushrooms (or more depending on if you like mushrooms)

2 tbsp butter

1 can Cream of Mushroom soup

4 chicken breasts

Salt & pepper

1/4 cup flour

2 tbsp olive oil

1/4 cup chicken broth

In a skillet, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Saute mushrooms until soft. Move to a bowl and save for later.

In same skillet, heat olive oil. Pound chicken breasts to about 1/8 inch thick. Season on each side with salt and pepper. Dredge in flour. Brown in oil about 4-5 minutes on each side. Move chicken to a plate.

Add chicken broth to skillet and scrape up drippings and other bits in skillet. Add mushrooms back in along with Cream of Mushroom soup. Mix everything together over medium heat. Add in chicken and coat with soup mixture. Cover and simmer about 8-10 minutes or until chicken is done, turning chicken half way through.

 

Top with mushroom sauce to serve.

This would go great with some rice or egg noodles and a veggie. In the picture above, I served it with Au Gratin Potatoes (recipe to come), but the combo of creamy chicken and cheesy potatoes was a little heavy.

Chicken Lombardi

Tuesday (if she doesn't decide to arrive before the scheduled C-section) my wife and I will welcome our second child, a girl. As the big day approaches, I've put together some meals in the freezer so we won't have to worry about cooking in the coming weeks when we are exhausted beyond belief. Of course, there are batches of Baked Ziti of various sizes, but we decided to see if I could duplicate another great fix-ahead meal.

In my wife's hometown of Salisbury, NC, a family friend has a catering company/restaurant called L.A. Murph's. Among other things, it has take-and-bake meals that our in-laws often bring when they come to visit, including when our son was born a couple years ago. One of our favorites is the Chicken Lombardi (or Lombardy, but I'm going with the Italian spelling). We've been thinking for a while that we need to make our own, so I decided to make it the other night and put a batch aside for after the baby comes.

Having never made this before, I searched for a simple recipe that looked like it would be good. I found one on food.com, and it turned out pretty well, though I made a few tweaks. So having given full credit to the original, here's my version:

Ingredients1-2 cups sliced mushrooms
4-5 tbsp butter, divided
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
flour
1-2 cloves garlic, chopped
3/4 cup Marsala wine
1/2 cup chicken broth
salt and pepper
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella or Italian blend cheese

Preheat the oven to 450.

Before you get cooking, you need to get the chicken breasts nice and thin. The best way is to cover them with a sheet of plastic wrap and pound them until about 1/4-inch thick. If you don't have a meat hammer/tenderizer, I've heard you can also roll them thin with a rolling pin.

Heat up a skillet over medium/high heat, melt 2 tbsp butter and saute the mushrooms. When they're tender, set them aside in a bowl.

Melt the rest of the butter in the skillet. Dredge the chicken in flour and brown (about 3-4 minutes on each side). Put the chicken in a baking dish coated with cooking spray. Top with the cooked mushrooms.

Keep the skillet on the heat. Add the garlic and brown a bit. Pour in the wine and broth slowly (it'll steam, splatter and hiss). Scrape the pan to loosen up all the drippings, garlic and bits o' chicken, etc. Season with a little salt and pepper. Bring to a boil. Lower the heat to medium/low and simmer for about five minutes. Pour over the chicken and mushrooms. Sprinkle with cheese. Bake at 450 for 12-15 minutes, or until cheese starts to brown.

The picture below shows the dish before it's topped with cheese and baked. Some how I forgot to take a picture afterward. Next time I make it, I'll try to remedy that.

 

We like it with some rice (like a boxed rice mix) and veggies. You could also do mashed potatoes.

Like I said, I made a batch (and later another) to freeze for another night. Instead of using a baking dish, I used an 8x8 aluminum pan. I bought three of these for about $2 at the grocery store.

I suggest letting it cool a bit, then putting the shredded cheese on top. Wrap it up with a few layers of plastic wrap. Let it cool completely in the refrigerator, then put it in the freezer.

To serve it later, you're best off defrosting it completely, then following the normal bake instructions. If not, you can bake it longer and lower. Try 400 for about 45 minutes.

Taco Night

History tells us that back in the Dark Ages, families would gather each Wednesday for a special event called Il Giorno del Spaghetti Principe. Obviously times change. And nowadays, in many families, there is excitement about Taco Night!

Now, this isn't much of a recipe. In fact, I'm not gonna give you specific measurements at all. But Taco Night is always a win in our house, because it's tasty and it's quick and easy. Who can beat that?

Our Taco Night typically involves chicken tacos (ground beef or turkey also work). I cut up a couple of boneless, skinless chicken breasts and cook it in a pan in a little olive oil. Usually I add some chopped onion and garlic as well. Once the chicken is browned, I throw in some mushrooms and add my favorite seasonings to taste. The great part about this is you can put in whatever you want. I typically use (a lot of) ground cumin, chili powder, cayenne pepper, paprika and garlic powder. Mix it together first or add one at a time. If you like other stuff or don't like some of those, that's fine. Again, use what you like. Stir in 1/4 to 1/2 cup of water and simmer till the chicken is cooked and the spices are evenly distributed. You can also add a little corn starch to the mix to thicken it all up.

You can cut corners a bit by buying a packaged taco seasoning mix. Beware, though, that they have a lot of sodium. Alton Brown, one of my favorite cooking personalities (he's really not a chef) has a great recipe for a taco seasoning mix called Taco Potion #19 that I've used and liked a lot.

Once the mix is done, we serve it on some warmed tortillas with guacamole, cheese, salsa, black beans or whatever toppings you like.

One variation I like from time to time is shredded chicken. I've done this a couple of ways. One way is to put the chicken breasts in a pot of boiling water. When they're cooked, drain most of the water, shred them with a couple of forks, return the meat to the little bit of water in the pot, add your spices and cook until evenly seasoned. You can also add in a little cheese and some milk to help it melt. Or before you go to work in the morning, put the chicken breasts in a Crock Pot. Add a can of Mexican stewed or diced tomatoes and some spices to taste and let it cook all day. Then just shred, stir and serve.

Even though it's just a chicken breast per person, we always find it makes a very filling meal, even with a little extra.

KID REVIEW: Our 19-month-old isn't too big on meat yet, but he LOVES black beans and guacamole. He will eat every bit he can get and wear much of it. So Taco Night is also bath night at our house.

Intro to Italian cooking: Baked Ziti

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me a question about Italian cooking, I wouldn't be worried about recipes, because I'd be eating out every night. From what I can gather, non-Italians think we Italians have a magical/mythical ability to make edible masterpieces from pasta, cheese, garlic, tomato sauce and a few other ingredients. That happens to be true, but you non-Italians can learn some of our God-given culinary skills.

From time to time I will include some of my Italian recipes, but we'll have to work up to the really good stuff. To begin building up, we'll start with a classically delicious recipe that is very easy to make: Baked ziti. Master this to build confidence in your culinary skills by creating something everybody likes. Seriously, everybody likes baked ziti, right? If you don't, well, I'm not sure I wanna know you.

Anyway... here's what you'll need:

1 lb box of ziti
1 jar tomato sauce of your choice (more if you're like me and like more sauce)
1 lb ricotta cheese
2 cups shredded mozzarella/Italian cheese mix divided

You'll never see a simpler list of ingredients for something so good! Start off by bringing a pot of water to a boil and stir in the ziti. Cook it a little less than what you normally like for pasta, because you're gonna cook it again. Drain the ziti and put it back in the pot.

Italian cooking secret #1: When making pasta, as soon as you cook and drain it, return it to the pot and stir in some sauce. This helps keep the noodles from sticking together.

In this case, go ahead and dump the whole jar of sauce in and stir it all up. Then add in the ricotta and mix thoroughly.

Italian cooking secret #2: Use ricotta. If you ever see an Italian recipe that calls for cottage cheese, replace it with ricotta. For some reason, perhaps because of availability or likely for cost, a lot of people like to substitute cottage cheese for ricotta. This is ridiculous. They are NOT the same. To begin with, cottage cheese is nasty. Even if you like it, you must understand there is a very significant culinary difference between cottage cheese and ricotta, and that is that cottage cheese has way more whey. Whey, of course, is the liquid. Ricotta, though it has some whey, is far more curd (solid). In fact, it should be pretty firmly packed. It also tastes better and is meant for Italian cooking. So reject all notion of cottage cheese.

OK. Back to the recipe. To the ziti, sauce, ricotta mix add about 1.5 cups of the shredded cheese and mix.

Italian cooking secret #3: Want to add a little more flavor to your Italian recipes? When a recipe, including pizza, calls for mozzarella or an Italian cheese mix, try substituting in some cheddar or other mix. When I made my most recent batch of baked ziti, I had some Mexican mix in the fridge and added that in. It just adds a little sharpness to the flavor.

So now you have your ziti mix. You can stop here as far as your mix, but you don't have to. I like to add in some Italian herbs (e.g. oregano, basil). Feel free to add in other ingredients you may enjoy, like mushroom or other veggies, Italian sausage, ground beef, meatballs, etc. I seem to remember my cousin's husband making baked ziti once with pepperoni slices and other meat mixed in. It was great. It's part of what makes this recipe so versatile.

Whatever you've mixed in, spread it into a large baking dish sprayed with cooking spray (makes clean-up MUCH easier). Top with the remaining cheese (and maybe some more herbs). Bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for about 30 minutes or until it's all bubbly and cooked through and the top starts to brown. If the top browns too quickly, tent with foil.

Like I said in the ingredients, if you're like me, you'll want more sauce. I LOVE sauce, so I always make another jar to top it all off. In the picture above you'll see I added some (store-bought) meatballs. This meal goes great with a salad and some garlic bread.

Ziti: Italian for "share"
OK. That's not true at all, but it might as well mean to share, because this is such an easy meal to do just that. Often when I make baked ziti, I make two batches, because other than the minimal time it takes to heat a little more water than for a single batch, there's no added prep time. The second batch (which you do not bake) I either put in the freezer for another day, or share it with someone else. You just defrost and bake it.

I put a batch away before our son was born, along with some other pre-made meals, so we wouldn't have to worry about cooking in those early days of parental exhaustion. I love to make it for other new parents, too, because it's easy on both ends, and like I said earlier, everyone likes it. Want proof? We just took over a batch to friends who had their second child last week. Their almost three-year-old loved it, telling his parents, "Mr. Kevin is a good cooker!"

His dad said they finally stopped him after three plates. MANGIA!