First Try at Chicken Marsala

I would really like to master Chicken Marsala. Didn’t get there tonight, but at least moved in the right direction. I made the recipe from Salt to Taste: The Key to Confident, Delicious Cooking , which (yep, here comes the part about Amazon reviewers again) is recommended as a book to help improve skills – reviewers commonly mention reaching for this book over and over.

After first cutting some fresh rosemary from the backyard (and feeding some to the goats, who love rosemary), I gathered ingredients. We had the hardest time finding marsala, and never did find the dry marsala called for in the recipe. It wasn’t an overly sweet marsala, either, so could have been worse.




I used several sorts of mushrooms, and tried Costco’s chicken breasts. They didn’t strike me as super fresh. When I pounded them thin, they sort of macerated in an unpleasant way.

The mushrooms get pan roasted, the chicken pounded flat, then the finely chopped rosemary is patted onto the chicken with salt and pepper. The chicken pieces are then lightly floured and cooked on the stovetop. I used coconut flour to make this a Paleo dish.



The cooked chicken gets set aside, then the mushrooms are added back into the pan, which is deglazed with the marsala (which is cooked off entirely) then a bit of chicken stock and butter added to the pan for a bit and it’s done.

 
It was good, but I need to keep trying to perfect it. There was a bit of dryness to the coating, which might have been the use of coconut flour instead of all-purpose flour, but I’m not ready to concede that point at this time!

The book was enjoyable, though. Again it was my first foray into a book off the shelves. It does seem to be a book that has a good balance of in-recipe teaching and usability. I’ll enjoy experimenting from it another time.

I also want to share what Araminta made tonight for her dinner (and Lucinda’s). With their severely limited ingredient list, she made “Meatza” – doesn’t it look good? They can’t do tomatoes, so she made a white sauce using hemp milk, rice flour, a bit of potato starch, and garlic. No cheese, of course, and the “crust” is ground beef seasoned with those pizza-type spices that they’re safe for. The toppings are olives, pineapple chunks, mushrooms, and caramelized onion.




A big green salad, and another night’s a wrap.