Wednesday, October 21, 2009 Chicken

Reduced Tomatoes with Shiitake mushrooms appetizer

Tomato is one of those ingredients that can add so many wonderful things to your dish. It can manifest itself in different ways in a dish through flavor or texture. It can be sweet or sour, pureed or diced, it can be turned into a sauce or a paste and so many more wonderful things. Sometimes i think its hard for one to go wrong with tomato sauce. In this dish i first grilled the tomato to take away as much of the acidity as possible so that i am left with its sweetness alone. Then I diced it and tossed it in a soffritto of garlic and shiitake mushrooms. Once the ingredients were well mixed i started the process of reduction by adding in tomato sauce and a little meat broth. Set fire on a very low simmer until most of the liquid is gone. The last step is tossing in melted mozzarella cheese to give it a surprising texture before setting them on the aluminium rings. The result is a mellow mixture of sweet tomato and shiitake aroma enhanced by the texture provided by the mozzarella cheese.

Fricasseed Chicken with egg and lemon

Chicken to me is a miracel meat. Some people consider chicken as the lesser meat because of its almost neutral flavor but to me it is one of the most flexible meat readily available in the grocery store. It has the ability to carry a variety of flavor making it both challenging and enticing. This is seen in how many chicken dishes there are known to man. In this dish i tried a very classic italian style of cooking chicken- fricasseed. The yellow "thing" you see in the picture here is the egg and lemon that carried the flavor of the entire dish. Cooking this is a little tricky- if you are using different parts of the chicken on this dish, cook the thigh and the breast parts separately due to difference in cooking time. The end result of this dish was a chicken dish with a very summery taste to it. The meat was light and enhanced by the egg and lemon coating.

Rolled Fillets of Chicken Breast with Pork and Rosemary

Making this dish made me realize how important it is to have a good set of knives. Do not ever try to use a regular kitchen knife to fillette anything, you will end up with a lot of wasted meat due to the wrong cut being made- do not throw it away though coz you can use those trimmings for your meat broth. This dish was fairly easy to make but i was a little disappointed about it. For me it just had so little flavor with it- until now i still cant think of a way to enhance this dish to make it more exciting and interesting.