Chicken Gloria

Chicken Gloria has obviously become really popular on Pinterest. It kept popping up in the Food & Drink category, and the picture looked really delicious so I visited this blog multiple times, mainly because my iPad ONE kept shutting down my Pinterest app... incredibly annoying. It was really simple and obviously I didn't have all of the ingredients exactly, so substitute I did. I swear I rarely have everything that a recipe calls for, but this still tasted very good. I didn't take step-by-step pictures this time, but I did think these pics of what I would call a casserole turned out relatively pretty. I served it over brown rice and garnished with parsley. Since cream of mushroom soup is only 90 calories a serving and I used chicken breast tenderloins and skim milk, it really wasn't too terrible for you. Charlie loved the Chicken Gloria, but I'm starting to think maybe he's not a good scale for judging the quality of my food, because he literally likes and eats everything.

Big pan of awesome. I love really hot, wet foods. Sounds weird, but true.

 

A bird's eye view of my plate.

So I totally recommend following the instructions for Chicken Gloria from this blog, since she totally created this recipe. But if you want to see the types of substitutions I made, here is my recipe... which worked out lovely:

Chicken Gloria

• Chicken breast tenderloins
• Flour (season it)
• Olive oil and Butter (enough to brown chicken and cook mushrooms)
• 8 oz. container of Mushrooms (I used Baby Bellas)
• 1/2 cup Marsala wine (had this leftover forever; any fortified wine would work)
• Can Cream of Mushroom Soup
• 1/2 cup milk
• Shredded mozzarella
• Parsley
• Salt and Pepper (duh)

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Dredge seasoned chicken breasts in flour and brown in a combination of oil and butter. They don't need to be cooked through because you're gonna put them in a small casserole dish next.  Remove chicken from pan (obviously).

Add butter to pan and brown chopped mushrooms. They should be golden when you add the Marsala. Reduce for a minute and then add the cream of mushroom and the milk. Mix until blended. Taste and season if needed.

Pour sauce over the chicken breasts in the pan you plan to bake in. Seal with tin foil and bake for 30 minutes.

Uncover the chicken, sprinkle a good amount of cheese on top of each chicken breast and cook uncovered until melted and browned. It will look like it's ready to be eaten... I may have even thrown on the broiler (but do not forget it! I almost did).

Add parsley to make pretty and serve over rice. Or egg noodles... they'd probably be good too. Hell, maybe even whole wheat penne.

Profile picture of my meal

See... almost burned the top. Almost!

Delicious and Beautiful. Especially with that parsley.

Pasta Photo Essay

So maybe I didn't make this homemade pasta today, on a Tuesday, after finishing up the Contracts portion of the first few weeks, and finding out I am terrible at remedies and damages and third party beneficiaries... BUT last week, I made these noodles from a frozen ball of dough and took tons of pics. Today I made a sauce and thawed out some really-overdue-for-eating meatballs from a bag. Hey, it can't all be done by hand after a long day of studying.

The finished product, plus a few Instagram effects.

The dough is just all purpose flour and eggs. About 3/4 of a cup of flour per egg. You can add a little water or olive oil if it is too crumbly and dry. The Kitchenaid mixer makes this process a hell of a lot easier. It also makes it simpler if you have a huuge batch of dough and freeze the leftover in balls for later.

Mash the ball of dough semi-flat (you don't even need a rolling pin) and pass it through the machine after you turn it on and make sure it's on the widest setting.

Continue passing the dough through the machine, slowly decreasing the width of the setting [make it thinner].
Eventually it will get hard to manage and you may have to cut the dough in half [if, like me you started with a rather large ball of dough]

Yeah, you MAY have to cut it in half. It can get pretty long.

After running it through the cutting tool on the machine, you have the noodles! Sorry for the blur, zoomed in on the pasta.
Grandma gave me this pasta maker and it is a real gem. And so fun. And easy.

Toss the pasta with flour so it doesn't stick to itself. Let it dry on the counter [or a pan or a plate if you're cleaner than me].
You can then cook it OR freeze it for a while in ziplock bags.
[I'm not sure for how long it lasts in the freezer. You can probably Google it, but after 3 weeks it's still tasted good to me].

Salt your water really well and boil until it tastes right.
Usually no more than 5 minutes when I make my pasta on the thinnest setting, but keep an eye on it.
 

For the sauce this time, I chopped onions and garlic, sauteed them for a while in a combination of butter and olive oil [not much of either! not trying to get fat], then put a finely chopped red bell pepper [food processor fine] in the pan too and cook for a little while longer. I added about a can of petite diced tomatoes or a little more. Normally I would've made the sauce from [more] scratch, but in the interest of weeknight cooking, I added a generic brand sauce in addition to these ingredients [but not too much!]. There might also be some white wine in there. Yeah, there definitely is. Along the way, to keep the sauce from getting too thick and to build the flavors [like Anne Burrell does in her bolognese recipe], I added water and let it reduce several times. I threw in the partially thawed [though already cooked] meatballs to cook in the sauce. At the very end I added some pasta water and let the sauce simmer until it was the right consistency for my liking. Instead of tossing the pasta in the sauce like I would normally do, I just put this concoction on top, mostly for aesthetic purposes of these pictures. Before I ate it, I tossed it around of course. The cheese on top is a three cheese Trader Joe's blend, but clearly there's parmesan in there.

The completed sauce! PS: 3 meatballs = 200 calories [of this brand]. They were pretty huge.

My incredibly staged photo of my bowl of pasta.

Just heaped up there in a mound to make it beautiful.

Like I was only gonna have one meatball...

Not gonna ruin it with your average Parmesan shake cheese.

All in all this was a pretty delicious meal. I wouldn't typically taint homemade pasta with a jarred sauce, but since this pasta is so easy to make now, I don't care as much. The addition of vegetables, lots of seasoning, and wine really helped it out. It was definitely pretty and tasted good to me [and Charlie, but he'd eat anything]. Next time though...