Crock Pot Chicken Cacciatore

My father is Italian. My mother is Irish. When they were dating, the first meal she made for him was chicken cacciatore. That was bold. But she forgot the spaghetti. That was a little embarrassing, and a cute story she's told many times, which makes a dish a sentimental favorite for me.

Now silly family stories aside, chicken cacciatore is a truly classic Italian dish. Translated, it means hunter chicken, and alla cacciatora means a dish prepared hunter-style. Now real chicken cacciatore involves braising the chicken slowly in wine, etc. But we don't have time for that in our busy lives, right? Of course not. But we do have a Crock Pot that will let us make a simplified yet delicious facsimile of the classic recipe.

Ingredients1 lb chicken
1 onion cut into eight pieces
1 green pepper cut into strips
1 jar spaghetti sauce
1 small can tomato paste
1 lb pasta of your choice

DirectionsFirst a word about the chicken. Traditionally, you should use a cut up chicken still with the bones in. I find that a little more difficult to eat, especially when you're feeding it to children, so I prefer to use boneless chicken. When I made this the other day, I used breasts, but you can use whatever pieces of the chicken you'd like, including boneless thighs, which are readily available in your grocery store's meat department.

OK. Now that we have our chicken, put it in a Crock Pot. I like to put it in when the meat is still at least partly frozen so that it hold together a little better during a full-day's stewing. Next add in the onion and green pepper. Dump in the spaghetti sauce and the tomato paste. (I added this ingredient to the recipe even though I didn't use it myself the other day, because I found the sauce to be a little thin in the end, and I think the paste will help thicken it. I will update the recipe the next time I try it.)

Turn the Crock Pot on low, put on the lid and go to work. Dinner will be pretty much ready when you get home. All you'll have to do it make the pasta (I used rigatoni) when you get home.

Sorry for the bad photo. I'll update this, as well, the next time I make this.

The chicken will be fork tender. Serve it over pasta with some garlic bread and a side salad. It doesn't get much easier than this, and is perfect for a chilly day.

Veggie & Turkey Sausage Lasagna

I know, I've been very slack lately posting recipes, but I'm gonna try to do better with several in the can, as we say in TV.

This recipe is another lesson in Italian cooking, as I long ago promised, but an intermediary step. It is lasagna, but not traditional in a couple of senses. One way is the ingredient. The other is a short-cut in the cooking.

This is something I came up with kind of on the fly. We were looking for a big family dinner with leftovers that had some nutritional value. So I lasagna took care of the first part. Vegetables took care of the second. This is also another of those recipes you can tweak for whatever your taste.

Ingredients
2 tbsp olive oil1 lb turkey sausage (removed from casings and crumbled)
1 cup chopped onion
3 cloves garlic chopped
1 cup chopped carrots
1 cup broccoli florets
1 zucchini sliced
1 cup sliced mushrooms
Handful fresh basil
2 jars tomato sauce (whatever kind or kinds you like)
1 box no-cook lasagna noodles
1 lb ricotta
1 lb shredded cheese (I believe I used one bag of Italian recipe and one Taco blend)

Directions
Heat the olive oil in a large skillet or wok (a wok is actually ideal for later). Brown sausage. When it's about done, add onion, garlic, carrots and broccoli, and cook until they start to get soft. Add zucchini, mushrooms and basil, and cook until they start to get soft. Add a little sauce and the ricotta. Cook until the whole mixture is well mixed and starts to get a little bubbly.

Spread some sauce in bottom of a large roasting pan (aka lasagna pan). Place a third of the lasagna noodles (no need to cook these) on top of the sauce. Spread some more sauce on top of noodles. Spread half of the sausage/veggie/cheese mixture, and sprinkle with some of a third of the shredded cheese. Top with another third of noodles, then more sauce, then the rest of the mixture, a third of the shredded cheese, last of noodles, more sauce, last of shredded cheese. Sprinkle some Italian herbs on top if you'd like, and yes, I like!

Cover pan with foil and bake at 375 for 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 15 minutes until the whole thing is bubbly and melty. Yes, those are technical culinary terms.

Congratulations. You have made lasagna. Eventually we'll get to the real deal, but like I said at the top, this is a great intermediary step to learn some of the basics.

Serve this up with salad, garlic bread and the rest of the sauce heated.

We fed four adults and a child, and still had about half to put in the freezer for another day plus a couple servings for lunch at work the next day. I originally planned to make it with much less of the sausage, but I'm glad I used it all. It added a great flavor! You could make it without meat at all, but again, I think you'd lose a lot of flavor.

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!