Chicken Recipes: Chicken Cacciatore

While searching the chicken recipes on the GroupRecipes.com site, I found a quick and easy version of one of my favorite chicken dishes: “Chicken Cacciatore.” This one was submitted by “Whodunitrdr,” who adapted the recipe from one that he had received from a chef friend. What I like about this recipe is that it provides an abundance of rich flavor with very little cooking time—as though the sauce had been slow cooking for hours rather than minutes.

Ingredients List:

• ½ onion; chopped
• 2 cloves garlic; crushed
• ½ pound sliced fresh mushrooms
• 1 tablespoon olive oil for sautéing the vegetables
• 15 ounces canned tomatoes; diced
• 1 cup red wine
• 1 cup beef broth
• ½ teaspoon basil
• ¼ teaspoon oregano
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 whole chicken; cut up
• ½ cup flour
• 2 tablespoons olive oil for frying the chicken

Directions:

• Sauté the onion, garlic, and mushrooms in 1 tablespoon olive oil until translucent.
• Add the tomatoes, red wine, and beef broth; simmer and reduce for about 5 minutes.
• Add the seasonings, stir, and simmer.
• Combine the flour, salt, and pepper, and dredge the chicken pieces in this mixture.
• Brown the floured chicken pieces in 2 tablespoons olive oil until golden.
• Transfer the browned chicken to an ovenproof casserole dish, cover the chicken with the sauce, and bake at 375ºF for 30 minutes.
• Serve the chicken and sauce atop a bed of buttered pasta or rice.

I served the chicken over penne pasta, which made a fantastic meal. One ingredient that was unexpected in this recipe was the beef broth, which I haven’t seen in any other chicken cacciatore recipe before. It provided a great flavor and subtle richness that made this dish irresistible. Try it for yourself and see what I mean. Thanks, “Whodunitrdr,” for this terrific recipe!

 

Chicken Recipes: Grilled Italian Chicken and Vegetable Soup

With the amount of daylight dwindling every day and the weather turning cooler, my time for outdoor grilling this season will probably be drawing to a close in the next few weeks. I’m not one of those who braves below zero temperatures during the winter just so I can have grilled food. I usually put the grill to bed around the first or second week of November (which is quite late for most Minnesotans, don’t cha know, especially considering that most folks have their snow blowers tuned up and ready to go before Labor Day), but who knows, with this particularly beautiful fall that we’ve been enjoying, perhaps I’ll be grilling outdoors until sometime in December. One can only hope.

Anyway, that brings me to my reason for today’s entry: With my love of grilled food and with the season in mind, a hearty chicken soup sounded really good for an autumn Sunday night supper. After browsing through numerous recipes on my favorite food sites, I found a good one: “Grilled Italian Chicken and Vegetable Soup,” courtesy of RecipeTips.com.

Grilled Italian Chicken and Vegetable Soup

I was fortunate that most of the vegetables and herbs called for in the recipe came out of my garden: tomatoes, carrots, onions, oregano, basil, and parsley, so the soup was inexpensive to prepare. The only ingredient I needed to purchase was zucchini, which I did have in my garden this year, but the time for harvesting zucchini is long gone in these parts. In addition to the fresh tomatoes, the recipe called for canned tomatoes with Italian seasoning, but I omitted the canned tomatoes and used an equal amount of fresh garden tomatoes in its place. I simply added a sprinkling of garlic powder and black pepper, as well as a bit more basil and oregano to make up for the extra Italian seasoning that would have been included had I used the canned tomatoes.

Now for the grilled part: As suggested in the recipe, I grilled skinless boneless chicken breasts, which were seasoned with lemon pepper. After the chicken cooled sufficiently, I simply chopped the chicken into bite-size pieces and added it to the soup, which, by the way, I cooked in a large pot on the stovetop, using canned chicken broth as a base for the soup.

Some of you might ask, “Why take the wonderful flavor of grilled chicken and drown it in a bowl of soup?” Well, the grilled taste really isn’t lost; in fact, it does so much to enhance the flavor of all the ingredients in the soup. I found this recipe to be very satisfying—one of those “comfort foods” that so many of us begin to think about this time of year. I hope you enjoy it!

 

Chicken Recipes: Grilled Chicken with Sautéed Vegetables over Pasta

You can count on one finger the number of really nice days we’ve had in southern Minnesota during this early spring season (that was the day last week when I used the grill for the first time this year), so I still have a bad case of spring fever. Yesterday, we dodged another snowstorm—we just got cold rain. (The snow stayed to the north—they can have it!) The weather this morning was rather bleak—dark, damp, and depressing—but this afternoon the sun reappeared, so now it seems to be a good day for my second round of outdoor grilling, although it is a bit on the cool side.

 

I found another easy-to-make but intriguing grilled chicken recipe on RecipeTips.com called, “Grilled Chicken with Sautéed Vegetables over Pasta,” and I’m anxious to try it. No, the name of the recipe is not so intriguing but the preparation is: A mixture of tarragon, parsley, garlic, and lemon is shoved under the skin of the chicken pieces prior to grilling, which sounds good to me. The chicken is served with sautéed vegetables and pasta, and the whole thing is sprinkled with feta cheese. The sautéed vegetable medley includes several of my favorites—bell peppers, carrots, onions, and snap peas. I’ll probably put some extra bell peppers on the grill because I love grilled peppers with just about anything.

 

I have on hand, all of the ingredients that the recipe calls for except the fresh tarragon and the feta cheese. Both ingredients add so much flavor to foods that I don’t think that I want to omit them, so it looks like I’ll be running to the store. I could use a few more bell peppers anyway.

 

While I was visiting the RecipeTips.com site (yes, it is one of my favorites), I noticed that they are featuring a promotion by Char-Broil for a number of grill giveaways during the summer. The only requirement for entering is that you must submit one of your own recipes to qualify. One of the prizes is Char-Broil’s Quantum Infrared Gas Grill, which I saw recently at Lowe’s and decided that it would be the ultimate in outdoor grilling. Since you can enter the contest as often as you wish, and the winners are chosen at random, I’ve decided that submitting a few zillion recipes might increase my chances to get my dream grill. Anyway, we’ll see what happens—and I’ll let you know if tonight’s grilled chicken recipe from RecipeTips is as good as it looks.