Cookology: Chicken Scarpariello
It's not that I don't know how to cook, or even that I don't like to. It's just that, for various reasons - stuff like "ridiculous scheduling considerations during most of college meant I went the way of the easy much of the time" (which, yes, meant that my diet through college was frequently terrible) - it's not something I have a whole lot of experience doing and thus I am something of a novice. (Comparatively, much of my flist has way more impressive skillz than I do, as in "if I look through a telescope I can sort of see the bottom of their shoes.") Still, everybody has to start somewhere, sometime, and I figure blogging about it is a good way to catalog what I do and how I do it - and sometimes, as mistakes are inevitable, how I should have done it.
Thus, blogging: FOR SCIENCE!
Last night's experiment was a Chicken Scarpariello recipe I found via Allrecipes.com's Dinner Spinner iTouch app. According to Arthur Schwartz (who has a slightly more involved recipe here), there's some indication that the dish is Italian-American (rather than straight-up Italian) in origin but has Southern Italian influence. The name itself means "shoemaker style," which evidently refers to the fact that either it's easy to make or the ingredients to make it are easy to obtain. As this particular meal goes, I'd say that either explanation is believable.
(That said, apparently we are not quite fancy enough to have all the ingredients on hand and so I had to do some subbing. Please refrain from pearl-clutching.)
The recipe, as written on Allrecipes:
1 1/4 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breast halves
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons butter
2 tablespoons shallots, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup water
1/2 cup white wine
1 cube chicken bouillon
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary, crushed
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 pinch ground black pepper
My substitutions:
2 tablespoons minced white onions instead of two tablespoons of shallots
1/4th teaspoon garlic powder instead of two cloves of garlic (1/8th teaspoon for every clove called for - thank God for them thar intertubes, because I had to look it up)
1/2 cup of water that some white vinegar looked at instead of white wine (although there are other ways to substitute for wine in cooking)
If I'd thought ahead, I'd have thawed out some chicken breast in advance and then cut them up and cooked as directed, but this was a more spur of the moment adventure. We had plain chicken strips - the kind that come precooked, in a bag - on hand (see what I mean about us not being fancy people?) that needed to be used, so I put those in the microwave to heat up per the directions and moved on to the next step.
What I should have done here is add a pinch of flour to the pan with the olive oil and butter, since I hadn't added any via cooking flour-dredged chicken. As it was, sauteeing the onion and... garlic powder... in the pure olive oil and butter went just fine and I added all the other ingredients as directed (plus a squirt of lemon juice, suggested in one of the comments) without any issues, in addition to a bit of flour after a minute or so when I realized that the sauce wasn't going to thicken because there wasn't anything that would thicken. (I am smart.)
Delaying the flour probably didn't hurt anything, but it did make things a little more complicated than really necessary. (Live and learn, I guess.) Once it reduced by the amount called for, I added the chicken back in and let it make nice with the sauce for a few minutes. Et voila! Chicken scarpariello.
Verdict: I served this with rotini pasta (I would like to try it with angel hair pasta as the submitter suggests because it is a fairly delicate sauce, but rotini's what we had on hand and, hey, it's colorful!) and it came out... quite good! The testers (read: my parents) approved, and I would make and eat it again happily. Next time I would add the flour from the beginning and probably even less of it than I did, though - while I didn't exactly get crazy and throw in a snowshower o' flour or anything, the sauce still came out a little thicker than I would consider really optimal for this dish.
The more you know!
Thus, blogging: FOR SCIENCE!
Last night's experiment was a Chicken Scarpariello recipe I found via Allrecipes.com's Dinner Spinner iTouch app. According to Arthur Schwartz (who has a slightly more involved recipe here), there's some indication that the dish is Italian-American (rather than straight-up Italian) in origin but has Southern Italian influence. The name itself means "shoemaker style," which evidently refers to the fact that either it's easy to make or the ingredients to make it are easy to obtain. As this particular meal goes, I'd say that either explanation is believable.
(That said, apparently we are not quite fancy enough to have all the ingredients on hand and so I had to do some subbing. Please refrain from pearl-clutching.)
The recipe, as written on Allrecipes:
1 1/4 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breast halves
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons butter
2 tablespoons shallots, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup water
1/2 cup white wine
1 cube chicken bouillon
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary, crushed
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 pinch ground black pepper
My substitutions:
2 tablespoons minced white onions instead of two tablespoons of shallots
1/4th teaspoon garlic powder instead of two cloves of garlic (1/8th teaspoon for every clove called for - thank God for them thar intertubes, because I had to look it up)
1/2 cup of water that some white vinegar looked at instead of white wine (although there are other ways to substitute for wine in cooking)
If I'd thought ahead, I'd have thawed out some chicken breast in advance and then cut them up and cooked as directed, but this was a more spur of the moment adventure. We had plain chicken strips - the kind that come precooked, in a bag - on hand (see what I mean about us not being fancy people?) that needed to be used, so I put those in the microwave to heat up per the directions and moved on to the next step.
What I should have done here is add a pinch of flour to the pan with the olive oil and butter, since I hadn't added any via cooking flour-dredged chicken. As it was, sauteeing the onion and... garlic powder... in the pure olive oil and butter went just fine and I added all the other ingredients as directed (plus a squirt of lemon juice, suggested in one of the comments) without any issues, in addition to a bit of flour after a minute or so when I realized that the sauce wasn't going to thicken because there wasn't anything that would thicken. (I am smart.)
Delaying the flour probably didn't hurt anything, but it did make things a little more complicated than really necessary. (Live and learn, I guess.) Once it reduced by the amount called for, I added the chicken back in and let it make nice with the sauce for a few minutes. Et voila! Chicken scarpariello.
Verdict: I served this with rotini pasta (I would like to try it with angel hair pasta as the submitter suggests because it is a fairly delicate sauce, but rotini's what we had on hand and, hey, it's colorful!) and it came out... quite good! The testers (read: my parents) approved, and I would make and eat it again happily. Next time I would add the flour from the beginning and probably even less of it than I did, though - while I didn't exactly get crazy and throw in a snowshower o' flour or anything, the sauce still came out a little thicker than I would consider really optimal for this dish.
The more you know!