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This recipe is from a McCormick ad in a food magazine — Food & Wine, I believe. It’s fairly low in fat, but you don’t notice it because of all the flavors and textures from the pancetta, rosemary and green olives. And even if you mess up the recipe by accidentally putting the bacon and the olives IN the sauce instead of sprinkling them on top (I was distracted because I was making a lemon cake at the same time), it’s still great.
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This recipe was last night’s dinner. I’m kicking myself for not taking a photo, but will add one next time. Maybe it stems from her French culinary training, but some of Marjorie’s sauces use a lot of butter. The thing with sauces is you can use as much as you want and I’ve found I’d rather make a sauce with lots of flavor-carrying fat and use a little of it then make a sauce that has half the butter and use twice as much. Not that it’s the case with every lightened recipe because there are plenty of good ones, but this recipe isn’t that rich if you just use a little bit of the sauce and ignore the part about using bread to soak up the rest. I left a lot of sauce in the pan.
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I don’t post a lot of savory recipes, but last night I tried one that’s been on my list for about, oh, 5 years. I needed to use up some Wine of the Month Club Pinot Grigio and this recipe was just perfect and very tasty. Unfortunately, the picture I took was awful — really, just very bad, so you’ll have to imagine a chicken breast (perfectly cooked, of course) with a white sauce and chunks for green onion and rosemary here and there. I served it with wild rice and green vegetables. This recipe is easy enough for a novice cook, but it helps to know that most of the grocery store chicken breasts aren’t 4 oz each. If you buy the “usual” ones rather than the air-chilled or organic, they can be about 8 oz each. When I’m using the large ones, I just cut them horizontally so I have two big pieces that are about 3 1/2 to 4 oz each.
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Final Verdict: This was a solid recipe, but I’m not sure I’d make it again because it was outrageously rich. I’m okay with rich desserts because you have the option to just eat a few bites, but entrees should be more balanced in protein/fat and carbs and this one just wasn’t. The filling has 12 tablespoons of butter and ¼ cup of cream and the pastry has 16 tablespoons. Not that everyone would eat a full serving of this, but some people (like my dad) would. So was it good? Yes, in a no-holds-barred splurge type of way. I liked this recipe and it was a lot of fun to make, but I wouldn’t put it in a regular rotation.
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Here’s one particularly good beef dish I made with Hershey’s cocoa. It was savory and colorful and all-around great, but I will admit to making one change. I stirred in about 2 teaspoons of sugar. If you make it, wait until the end, taste it, then make your decision. I think the sugar lifted the flavors, but they didn’t put it in the original recipe.
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I don’t post a lot of savory dishes, but this week I tried one that was just too good not to share. The recipe is called “Hungarian Noodle Casserole” and it’s from the Junior League of Palo Alto’s Private Collection. At first glance, it looks like your typical Noodles Romanov/Hungarian Noodle type dish, but I think the Junior League of Palo Alto got the spices just right. The flavors and textures were perfectly balanced and made a great side dish to lean roast beef. I suppose it might also work as an entrée with a little parmesan cheese and side of vegetables, but I liked it as a side.
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I pulled this off the Voskos web site where it’s featured as a recipe from celebrity fitness trainer Christine Avanti. Normally I would have gone straight to the baked goods, but this recipe seemed especially appealing with yogurt, cumin, garlic and parsley and I needed to make something for dinner.
It’s a pretty straightforward chicken recipe, but the yogurt soak and the spices come together in a big way. The yogurt tenderizes the chicken of course, but what the family loved was the flavor from the tang of the yogurt and the zing of lemon and cumin. The recipe was a lot of bang for the buck and I’m definitely putting it into rotation. I served it with plain white rice, but it would be fabulous with roast potatoes, basmati rice or just a big pile of steamed vegetables.
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