Faux Chicken Cacciatore

[merlinofchaos]

As this is Live Journal post type, er, 4 or whatever, the Food Post, the rest of this is behind a cut for those who don't care.

Sundays have become the day that tersa drops by and hangs out for football (and lo, the football season is restarting so our non-football activities will shortly be replaced by football day again for about 5 months.) It's also become the day that I am doing more experiments with food. Because LAM is an excellent experiment tester and is willing to be honest with me about what she thinks. (I value honesty a lot; I'm always trying to get better at cooking, and I know that I am a rank amateur that has figured out a few good things and it's a nice hobby to work on).

I was looking at one of my old recipes from a couple years ago, and LAM had mentioned that she loved polenta. So this morning when I got up and went to the farmer's market at 8am as I often do on Sundays lately, I set out to try and find something good for polenta. Initially I was going to just redo the recipe that sparked that: pan-fried tilapia with a mushroom cream sauce over polenta. Except that the tilapia at Seafood City that was already filleted looked absolutely horrible and I didn't feel up to the effort of filleting enough fish to feed 4 adults and a child who can eat for somewhere between .1 and 2 people depending on the day.

Instead, the farmer's market gave me a nice selection of vegetables (yay) including a big bag of various summer squashes. After an google search for "over polenta" recipe I eventually found one that appealed: Chicken cacciatore.

There were three catches:

1. There is no single recipe for the dish.
2. 4 out of 5 recipes called for bell pepper. esmerel says they taste like hate, and I'm not particularly fond of them myself, so they rarely enter the house.
3. I've never actually had Chicken Cacciatore. I have no idea what it's supposed to taste like. But I can guess.

I did more research. Cacciatore means "Hunter" in Italian, so more or less the dish really is "Chicken, hunter style" and it refers to a dish that was made during hunting expeditions by wealthy Italians. It was a stew that consisted of whatever game bird they hunted, vegetables from the garden, and whatever they foraged. This meant tomatoes, mushrooms and whatever was in season. In the original published recipes, it's made with a whole chicken, and later was modified for bite-sized chicken pieces. Almost all of the recipes I saw called for breast meat, but the idea of white meat chicken in a stew seems odd. White meat does not hold up well to high heat, it dries out something fierce and I'm simply not comfortable cooking with it right now. But thigh meat, on the other hand, holds up very well to stewing. And I always keep packs of Costco chicken thighs in the freezer. Score.

Also, squash seemed like it'd be a great replacement for bell pepper -- it will provide a similar texture and color and while it won't provide the sharpness, I didn't feel the dish really needed it. Given what I learned, it may not actually be faux, I think it has just as much right to be called chicken cacciatore as what is served in many Italian restaurnts, but since this is more or less my creation, I'm going with it.

Merlin's Faux Chicken Cacciatore

Serves six, I'd say. At least, 4 of us ate a decent portion and there's about 2 portions worth of leftovers.

• 5 chicken thighs, de-boned and de-skinned, cut into bite-sized pieces.
• Flour for dredging the chicken.
• Oil for frying the chicken. I used leftover bacon fat from breakfast; the recipe called for olive oil.
• One pound of mushrooms, sliced. I used chantrelles. I actually think they got a bit lost in the stew, maybe criminis would be better.
• 4 or 5 hearty pieces of random squash. I had a zuchini, a yellow crookneck squash, a green summer squash and two of those round squashes, cut into small pieces.
• One small onion, diced.
• 2-3 cloves garlic, minced.
• 2 15 oz cans of stewed tomatos -- if I were braver I would've tried fresh tomatoes.
• 1 cup white wine, warmed.
• 1 cup chicken stock or broth, warmed.
• Basil
• Parsley
• Rosemary
• Salt and pepper to taste

Salt the chicken pieces and then dredge them in flour. Fry them over medium-high heat in a couple tablespoons of the oil of your choice. I picked bacon fat because a couple of the recipes called for pancetta, so I figured a hint of bacon would be a great flavor in the background. I think this was absolutely true.

After the chicken has sizzled for a couple of minutes, add the onion, garlic and mushrooms. Continue frying all of this together. The flour soaks up most of the oil but the mushrooms provide a bit of liquid.

After the mushrooms are nicely cooked down -- which will be several minutes of cooking -- add the squash and saute for another couple of minutes, but don't overdo it. You just want to give that squash a bit of frying but cooking it too soft isn't so nice.

Add the cans of tomatoes and the basil, parsely and rosemary. The herbs are all to taste, I totally did not measure. But go easy on the rosemary. I definitely added too much and I did not think I added very much. Keep this at a high simmer and let a good portion of the liquid from the tomato cans boil off.

Add the cup of warmed wine. Simmer and reduce.

Add the cup of chicken broth. Simmer and reduce.

The entire cooking process took me about 2 hours, there was a lot of waiting around and simmering and reducing.

Edit: I forgot to add that I put a heavy pinch of kosher salt in when the mushrooms and onions went in, and also a few grinds of black pepper. That's the old "salt and pepper to taste" that's in pretty much every reicpe ever. =)

You can serve this in a number of ways. I particularly went for the simple polenta recipe and I think the polenta was an excellent contrast to this sauce. But it would be good over rice or pasta or almost anything you can think of, I think. Serve with bread and a salad.

Really, this was completely awesome. I'm looking forward to enjoying the leftovers.