You can find a pretty good transcript of the recipe here (but not quite complete, annoyingly), if you don’t have the cookbook. Note that you will also need her instructions on sauteing mushrooms (this one is a direct, complete copy) and brown-braising pearl onions (close enough), even if you think you know how to do these things.

Some notes:

• One of the best things about the original recipe is the detailed information on wine. It recommends pairing with “a fairly full-bodied, young red wine, such as Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône, Bordeaux-St. Émilion, or Burgundy,” and using any of those or a Chianti to go into the stew.
• 3 cups of wine = 1 bottle. I doubled the recipe. Whoo!
• I bought pre-cut-up stew meat, some of which was cut a lot finer than the other, and on the whole big chunks worked a lot better for drying and browning.
• Conversely, I couldn’t find an unsliced chunk of bacon anywhere, and regular old thick-sliced seemed to work okay.
• I over-salted because I forgot, as always, to account for the massive amounts of salt in bouillon cubes. Use caution, or perhaps better beef stock.
• Blanching helps when you realize you have to peel 48 pearl onions.
• I couldn’t really get the sauce to thicken in the end, but it seemed to end up okay just letting it reduce a lot even if it never really reached light-spoon-coating consistency. =/

For extras, here is the rosemary bread recipe I have been fussing with of late. It’s sort of long but that’s because the procedure is the complicated part; sorry. Start this ~3 hrs before you want to eat it.

• 2 1/2 tsp yeast, which is~1 packet
• 2 c. warm water, ~110-115 F, which is warm but just shy of scalding
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp salt
• 4 c. flour. Bread flour is nice if you can get it, and if you do not consider extra gluten cheating.
• 2 tsp. minced fresh rosemary plus more for topping. Fresh is important! You can sub out some for fresh thyme.
• olive oil, corn meal, sea salt

Dissolve yeast in the warm water and sugar. If it’s NOT instant/fast-acting/bread-machine yeast, give it <5 min to froth up. Otherwise, immediately add flour, salt, and 2 tsp rosemary and stir until blended. Do not knead! Cover and let rise for 1 hour or until double in size; bonus points for putting it someplace slightly warm and moist.

Oil a baking sheet and sprinkle with corn meal. Perhaps try oiling your hands instead of flouring them, as the dough is super sticky, then divide it in half, shape each half quickly and loosely into a round by tucking the edges under, and place on the baking sheet. Cover and let rise another hour. The stickiness is again a problem; cooking-sprayed plastic wrap is the only thing I’ve managed to use that DIDN’T stick horribly and make the top of my loaves lumpy.

With bread, some last-minute rising happens in the oven and for that you want things hot and steamy (har). Start heating your oven early, maybe half an hour into the second rise, to 450 or “lots.” My oven here has no numbers on the dial between 350 and 500 so I use my imagination, but I don’t think getting it too hot is a possibility. If you have a pizza stone, put it in now. Also put a cast-iron skillet in the bottom of the oven (or something else which can be raised to high temps empty, then have cool water thrown in it without exploding).

When bread is again about doubled in size, brush with olive oil and top with more rosemary and plentiful crushed sea salt. Get yourself some water, maybe 1/4 cup, on hand near your oven as now you must act quickly! Put the bread in (just stick the pan on the pizza stone if using one, unless you want to get fancy and try to slide the bread onto the stone directly), dump the water on your previously-heated skillet or whatever where it will send up exciting clouds of steam, and close the oven door quickly. Bake 10 min, adding more water for steam if it runs out. Then turn the oven down to 375 and bake another 20 min or so until it’s golden-browny.

I came home today with a spring in my step, a gleam in my eye and a desire to cook with garlic, lemon, white wine and butter. Somewhere the conception and realization of such a dinner, Mike walks in, nods sagely, announces a quite fancy name for such a simple dish and also suggests adding capers. Capers! I had never eaten them before! With a bit of testing, salting, peppering and capering, we then creating a delightful meal!

Anyhow, this is easy to make and awesome.

Dredge thin, flat strips of chicken in a mix of flour, salt and pepper and sear in a large pan with a thin layer of smoking olive oil. The salt and pepper mixed into the flour should be to taste. The flour helps keep the chicken juicy. Both sides of the chicken should be a golden brown. Remove the chicken from the pan.

The pan is now full of little chicken bits stuck to the bottom. Before they char, turn down the heat and pour oodles of white wine to deglaze the pan. Scrape all the bits off the bottom of the pan, because they are delicious. The white wine will reduce and serve as the base of the sauce.

Add a few cloves of garlic! Fresh garlic is better. If you do not have a garlic press, please imagine me glaring at you. Harshly.

Add the butter to the White Wine/Garlic mix! It’ll melt and brighten up the flavor. I used roughly a tablespoon and a half of butter per pound of chicken. Butter is part of my strict daily anti-hypothermia regimen. However, if you enjoy shivering and turning blue while swimming in the ocean, you might use less!

There is now a pile of golden brown, seared chicken in a bowl, and a simmering collection of white wine, butter and garlic in the pan. Turn up the heat add the chicken and reduce the sauce. The excess flour on the chicken will thicken the sauce. I’m not sure how to explain when the sauce is reduced enough, but it should be ‘Slightly Gooey’, in an appetizing way.

Now, go out back to your lemon tree and pick a good looking lemon. Slice it in half and squeeze the juice over the sauce & mix it up. There are now only three trials left to accomplish before we can enjoy the fruits of our labours: Salting, Peppering & Capering. The key to success is tasting the sauce. In the beginning, the wine will overpower everything. (DON’T PANIC.)

I added a sprinkling of salt, quite a few pinches of pepper, and a crash of capers to the mix. I don’t have a set recipe yet & every dish is more of a process than a formula.

Knowing why a dish is made is so much more valuable than memorizing simply how to make it. Even though someone already invented Piccata, figuring out the process on my own was a lot more fun than blindly following a proceedure. Also, this experiment ended successfully, which is key!

Ingredients:

• 4 boneless chicken breasts,* cut into bite sized pieces (1 ½ – 1 ¾ lbs.)
• 6 slices swiss cheese
• ½ cup white wine
• salt, pepper, tarragon to taste
• ¼ cup melted butter
• 1 can cream of chicken soup
• 2 cups Pepperidge Farm stuffing

* Or thighs. I’m sure everyone knows the deal on chicken breasts vs. thighs: the thighs are cheaper but fattier.

Directions:

1. Put chicken pieces in greased 9×13-inch baking dish. Season with salt, pepper, and tarragon and top with cheese slices.
2. Mix soup and wine, pour over chicken.
3. Mix stuffing and melted butter, crumble on top.
4. Bake uncovered at 300 for 90 minutes.

Be generous with the cheese and soup and wine and stuffing. They’re the best parts. The chicken is almost superfluous. (Though maybe I say that only because I’m not much of a carnivore.)

The only bad thing about this recipe is that it takes 90 minutes to cook… sometimes more like two hours. Conveniently, you probably have extra swiss cheese and white wine sitting around, so you can serve yourself some while you’re waiting.

Also while we’re waiting for my dinner to cook, I’ll introduce you to my grocery bag.

I made my grocery bag using the How to sew a curved bag gusset tutorial over at the U-handblog. It’s one of the most useful things I’ve ever made. In the picture above, it’s holding all the ingredients necessary for the cheese & wine chicken (sans wine — I forgot my ID and had to go back out for that later, le sigh — and also sans chicken, which was leaking, so I put it in a separate plastic bag) plus ingredients for the next two dinners I’ll make, which, since I’m cooking for one, is almost a week and a half’s worth of food.

I don’t have a car, so my grocery bag makes shopping much easier. I hardly ever buy more food than can fit in the bag (thanks to not having a car, of course), and it slings comfortably over my shoulder with a padded strap. Plus, it’s all in cheerful colors, so it makes me feel a bit more cheerful when I pull it out.

And now my food is done, after taunting me with its smell for an hour and a half:

On a somewhat related note, it has always been a challenge for me to find marsala in the wine section of a grocery store. Today, with no helpful wine expert to direct me in Safeway (Whole Foods, you spoil me), I spent a good 10 minutes searching up and down the aisle before finding it in next to the sherries and ports. Since I am kind of uneducated about wines and liquors in general, here is what I learned:

• Marsala is a fortified wine, meaning that it is combined with added alcohol (which has a natural preservative function). 
• There are sweet and dry versions, which can be matched to the recipe (I got a medium sweet one)
• The color varies from gold to red, which is why Wynn, Karen and  I were confused about what color it should be… turns out we were all correct!
• Because it is fortified and also often used in cooking, grocery stores will most likely carry it with other fortified wines or in a cooking wine section.  I found this bottle for about 5 bucks, and have plenty left. Since mine’s sweet I might try it by itself as a dessert wine…

Anyway, here are pictures and the recipe! Enjoy!

Chicken and Mushroom Marsala (recipe taken from Smitten Kitchen)

• 3 whole boneless chicken breasts with skin (about 2 1/2 pounds), halved  (I just used boneless thighs again for the lower price)
• 1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 onion, sliced thin
• 3/4 pound mushrooms, sliced thin
• 1/2 cup Marsala
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley leaves

Pat chicken dry and season with salt and pepper. In a large heavy skillet heat oil and 1 1/2 tablespoons butter over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking and brown chicken in 2 batches, transferring with tongs to a large plate as browned.

Discard all but 1 tablespoon fat from skillet and saute onion and mushrooms, stirring occasionally, until liquid mushrooms give off is evaporated. Add Marsala and cook mixture, stirring, until Marsala is almost evaporated. Add broth and chicken with any juices that have accumulated on plate and simmer, turning chicken once, until cooked through, about 15 minutes. Transfer chicken with tongs to a platter.

Simmer mushroom sauce until liquid is reduced to about 1/2 cup. Remove skillet from heat and stir in remaining 2 tablespoons butter and salt and pepper to taste, stirring until butter is just incorporated. Spoon mushroom sauce around chicken and sprinkle with parsley.

What you see in the foreground here is tea.  To be specific, puer tea harvested from wild, natural growing tea trees that are poetically described as 千年古树 (1000 year old ancient trees).  What many people don’t realize is that the tea plant, camellia sinensis, grows as a tree in the wild.  It’s cultivated as a bush at tea plantations for convenience of picking. 

The background is the rest of our dinner.  Nice and classy.

I’ve been experimenting with various combinations of putting fruits and nuts in my salads.  This one is bits of almond and green raisins.  The larger chunks are cucumbers, tomatoes, and chinese pear, all on a bed of lettuce.  The balsamic vinaigrette that I later poured over it was perhaps not the best dressing to use… something more like an Italian vinaigrette might have been better.

The bread crust was not especially crunchy or hard, the way I like it.  Still, it was slightly nutty with bits of raisins in it, which made it go very very well with the wine and the others.

The wine was a Yering Station 2007 Chardonnay, from the Mornington Peninsula in Australia.  I once spent an afternoon helping put netting over a friend’s wine grapes on the Mornington Peninsula.  Learned quite a bit about the process of wine-making.  I quite like Australian wines.  They’re well made, cheap at the price, and without the pretention of French wine.

And the coup de grace: Liver paté, a simple olive oil dipping sauce, and Denmark Havarti cheese with jalapeno.  

This brought to you courtesy of being bored.