First off an apology would seem to be in order. Sorry for the delay in posting the conclusion to this recipe. Things have been busy, but, I still should be cooking more. And, I will.
So, off to the races. After having boned and filleted the chicken breasts, I’m ready to put it together. Sauteed Fillets of Breast of Chicken with Lemon and Parsley, Siena Style. It’s a long title to a fairly straight forward and simple dish. As a matter of fact, it was a total of 20 minutes from start to finish, once you have all of the ingredients assembled and ready to go. I made this dish for 2 people.
For this dish you’re going to need:
1T Vegetable Oil (I used canola)
4T Butter
3 Chicken Breasts, filleted as per instructions
Juice of 1 Lemon
Salt
Fresh Ground Black Pepper
3T Parsley, Chopped
Lemon Slices (for garnish)
I chose a 14″ non stick skillet to do my cooking. I thought it would be big enough to accommodate all of the ingredients without crowding them too much.
Put 3 tablespoons of butter and the oil into the pan and heat on medium high. When the butter stops foaming put your chicken fillets in. Cook over medium high heat on both sides for about a minute total. Remove the fillets from the pan and place on a warm plate. Use a slotted spoon or a spatula for this, you could probably use a tongs too. Sprinkle the fillets with salt and pepper. Oh, this is where things got a little interesting for me. Sprinkle with salt and pepper seems like one of the easiest things you could probably do in connection with any recipe, right? I was so worried about doing every tiny thing correctly that a FORGOT to salt and pepper the chicken! What!? We didn’t notice this until tasting. I guess as I go along I’ll get a little more comfortable with cooking, taking photos and reading. I think it might be the reading part that has me confused!
On we go. Add the lemon juice to the pan (I did this no problem. Yes!), Let the juice simmer over medium high heat for about 20 seconds. Scrape up the loose cooking particles from the bottom of the pan while it is simmering. Use a wooden spoon for this so you don’t ruin a perfectly good pan. Next, add the chopped parsley and the remaining tablespoon of butter. Stir quickly for about 4 or 5 seconds. Turn the heat down to low and return the chicken to the pan along with any juices on the plate. Turn the chicken a few times then transfer to a warm platter with the pan juices. Garnish this with a slice of lemon and serve. I also garnished with a nice fresh sprig of parsley.
OK, let’s see how it turned out. As I sheepishly mentioned previously, I had forgotten to season with salt and pepper during the cooking process. So, when we had our first bite, it was like, hhmmm… something seems to be missing. And it was! We added the salt and pepper post cooking. Not exactly as the author had intended, but it would have to do unless I wanted to re-cook the dish. Not an option right at that moment, no more chicken left.
Once we added the seasoning it tasted great. A success for sure. The cooking instructions were right on the money. In truth, I was a little suspect given the cooking time, that the chicken would be cooked through. Not only was it cooked through, but, it was cooked to perfection. I served our sauteed chicken dish with a salad of tomato and avocado. A little bit of extra virgin olive oil, a touch of sea salt and fresh ground pepper (I remembered it that time!).
Here is the cost breakdown for this dish. The total for all of the ingredients necessary was $7.20. This assumes like all of my breakdowns will, that your kitchen is already stocked with the staples. In this case oil, butter, salt and pepper. If the amounts in the recipe are nominal I won’t include a price for them. If the amounts are a large proportion of the dish I will. So, $7.20 total or $3.60 per person. That is a bargain! You can’t buy it in a restaurant for that amount. This dish will fit nicely into any budget.
For those of you who are health conscience (like me), here is a nutrition breakdown of the dish. I cheated a little on the butter in this dish and used a Fleischmann’s Spread made with olive oil as a substitute. It foamed up nicely like butter, has no trans fats and only 1g of saturated fat per tablespoon. I thought this recipe would be a good one to test that out on. And, it seemed to work out just fine. I’m sure when it comes to the baking potion of this book REAL butter will be the only way to go. The chart shows a serving for one person.
Next we’re going to go back to where I probably should have started. Marcella Hazan’s Basic Homemade Meat Broth. It’s the base for many of the recipes in the book.
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And, here we go…
Just dive right in that’s what I always say. Well, maybe not always, but this time at least. It was hard making a choice on what to start this thing off with. Should I work through the book from start to finish or just hopscotch around? A tough decision. But, after looking through the book for hours on end, I finally decided to cook from different chapters using the most seasonal and freshest ingredients I could find at the time. There was also something else looming…
I have a confession to make right off that bat. I’m not a baker. There I said it and now I feel better. So, my decision on how to cook through the book was partly based on my fear of having to work straight through the baking section towards the end of it. I could have tackled most everything else in order, but having to face that baking section and at the end of what I hope will be a great experience seemed too scary. Maybe the result of all this will be a new found love and appreciation for the art of baking! Wishful thinking.
Well, we had to start somewhere, so why not with a recipe that has two parts. The first part is the prep and the second part is cooking the actual dish.
This recipe is going to be a two part post. The recipe that I will ultimately be making is, Sauteed Fillets of Breast of Chicken with Lemon and Parsley, Siena Style. Thankfully, the title is more intimidating than the actual dish. I chose this one to start with because it has a cooking skills lesson as the first part of the instructions. The lesson is on boning and filleting a chicken breast. This is something I figured I should know how to do the right way at some point anyway, so why not get some instruction from a pro from the beginning. Now, I may not be a professional chef, but I have cut up my share of poultry in the past. But, was I even doing it close to correctly? I’m certain that Marcella’s years of experience would yield a much better result than I was getting!
I decided to use this method exactly as it was written in the book and disregard anything I had taught myself in the past. I was a little doubtful that the short two page instructions with only two diagrams would be enough to actually explain how to do this without leaving me a with a big pile of hacked up chicken breast. I was determined to see if the description of the steps would yield a good result. I was already thinking what I could make with the future remnants of my first attempt.
With my trusty filet knife and two whole chicken breasts I was ready to give it a whirl. I read through the directions one last time. Here goes… WOW! I was amazed at how right on the instructions were. I thought for sure there was going to be a moment in the process where I would just have to wing it (so to speak).
Not so. It was easy. The whole thing took about ten minutes for both breasts. They even looked like they had just come out of a store bought package of boneless skinless chicken breasts. Now for the last part, the filleting. Easy once again, Could not have been easier in fact. When I was finished, not only did I not have a mass of unusable chicken meat, but I had four very uniform and surprisingly well trimmed chicken fillets. I think I should get an A in Marcella’s Chicken Fillet 101.
As for the photography, I’m just learning how things work. I think the shot of the finished plate (left) is OK. I’ve got a couple of pretty nice shots of the final dish for the next post.
Next, we’re going to try to put this recipe together using our newly filleted chicken breasts. How exciting!
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What’s happening here and why should I care about it? That’s what you’re probably asking yourself. And, to be honest it’s what I’m asking myself. Here’s my side of it anyway.
Sometime this past winter, much to my delight, my wife gave me a gift. A copy of Julia Child’s classic, two volume, cooking manual, Mastering The Art of French Cooking. I was really surprised and happy about it. Considering it wasn’t really that long ago that she informed my that I couldn’t purchase any more cook books. They had begun to take over the kitchen and our book shelves. Now she was actively engaged to making my collection grow! This was a breakthrough.
I love to cook. I’m not a professional chef by a long shot, but I consider myself to be a fairly competent home cook. About this same time I had decided that I would like to learn how to take decent photographs of food. I own and operate a restaurant and dining web site here in Sarasota Florida. I thought that my new found skill would be an asset to dineSarasota.com. Everybody loves to see food photography and I had a natural outlet to use the images. Sounds great.
My thought was I could whip up the recipes in my new book, take photos of my creations and then post them on the web. It would take three things that I was interested in and combine them into one great project. What an awesome idea! Well, as it turns out, I wasn’t the first one to think this would be fantastic. In fact, I came to find out after some research that someone had cooked Julia’s book AND blogged about it AND written a book about it AND they were making a major motion picture about it. How’s that for a great idea about two years too late!
I was bummed out. I still wanted to do this, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was either jumping on some band wagon or stealing someone’s idea. What to do?
After some thought I decided that the concept was still OK and I still wanted to learn about food photography and improving my cooking skills. I figured I would just go for it. But, how would I put my own stamp on something that had just been done and was about to get some big time exposure?
I Want To Learn To Take Photos Like These!
While looking through my collection of cook books another one of my wife’s gifts jumped out at me. Marcella Hazan’s groundbreaking work on Italian cuisine. The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is a 688 page combination of her two first books, The Classic Italian Cook Book and More Classic Italian Cooking. These books were responsible for bringing traditional Italian methods of cooking to American kitchens. First published over 25 years ago, these volumes were the first exposure many home cooks had to the proper ways to prepare classic Italian dishes. Marcella was to the Italian cooking movement in the states what Julia Child was to French cuisine. I thought this book would be an excellent choice for my project.
There are approximately 445 recipes in her book, I plan on tackling all, or at least most of them. I’m not sure how long that will take, but I guess we’ll find out. I’m going to cook most of these myself in my kitchen at home, using equipment that a normal home cook would have. To make things just a bit more interesting, I also plan on calling in some experts. One of the nice things about being involved in the dining and restaurant scene here in Sarasota is that I have made a lot great friends who are REAL chefs. I’m going to put some of them to work over the course of this project. I think it will be interesting to see how a seasoned pro goes about doing things compared to a novice.
I’m planning on costing out each recipe so we can see how much you would need to spend to prepare it. With the economy the way it is right now, everyone is watching their bottom line. It’s going to be interesting to see how these traditional dishes fit into our current budgets. And, last but not least, there is a local connection. Marcella Hazan lives here in Sarasota. Wouldn’t I just love to prepare a couple of dishes with the author herself! I’m going to work on that, so stay tuned. I’m going to get cooking soon. Buon Appetito!
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We’re excited to things started. Please check back soon. We should be cooking up some pretty amazing stuff. We’ll be be announcing soon which cookbook classic we’ll be taking on.
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