Chicken Cacciatore

It takes time to make things right. It takes fresh ingredients to make them better. It takes inspiration to make them perfect. The dinner on Monday night was perfect. The company was amazing too- but the food, Nona’s recipe, stole the show. I got a Rosie’s chicken, a free-range organic Petaluma chicken and had the butcher cut it up nicely for me. I’ve got to take a class on cutting birds up without hacking away at them. Anyways it was done nicely. Then, Saturday was spent just picking sun gold cherry tomatoes from our garden and cooking them down into a paste. We added all the Provençal herbs, onion, garlic, and a half of a cinnamon stick. It was boiled, strained into a double boiler, cooked down halfway, and put in the oven at 250 for an hour to get the paste I wanted. The entire day was spent making 6 ounces of tomato paste and playing in the backyard with Teddy. It really was a perfect day; the stuff of which dreams are made.

One of the major things I wish to remember about my time with my grandparents is how slowly the summer days would go by. There was nowhere to rush to and nothing that had to be done. The food would begin to be cooked but there was no timeline of when things would happen. My brother and I would look for frogs in the boathouse or fish off the end of the pier. Maybe grandma would want to be pushed in her inner tube around the end of the point or we would go for a boat ride in the pontoon boat. But nothing was a have to, nothing was stressed. That’s how Saturday felt, it was just my baby, my husband, and myself playing in the backyard and eating too many tomatoes. I hope to have many more days like that with my beautiful family. It’s amazing how slow the days seem and how fast the months are passing.

I’m glad we didn’t make the chicken on Saturday after the paste project because it ended up that there were many friends on Monday night who came to enjoy the meal. Shennon even brought a cucumber salad made with cucumbers from her garden and served in Nona’s little green bowls. In the recipe below, we added a bunch more garlic and used just picked tomatoes from the garden. The mushrooms were fresh baby bellas. The entire recipe was completed in the dutch oven. As I would like to make everything just as it’s written, it really doesn’t make sense to live here and eat anything out of a can. There is fresh food all year round and a lot of it is grown right in our backyard. I think grandma would have approved. I served it with garlic string beans and mash.

Chicken Cacciatore (4)

1 3lb Broiler-fryer cut up

½ cup flour

½ cup cooking oil

1 medium onion sliced and separated into rings

½ cup chopped green pepper

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 (1 lb.) can tomato, cut up

1 6 oz can tomato paste

1 4oz can sliced mushrooms, drained

1 tsp salt

¼ tsp. dried oregano leaves

1/8 tsp pepper

1 bay leaf

Shake chicken, a few pieces at a time in flour. Brown on all sides in skillet, removing pieces as they brown. Add onion rings, green pepper, and garlic to skillet. Sauté until tender. Do not brown. Drain. Stir in tomatoes, paste, mushrooms, salt, oregano, pepper and bay leaf. Return chicken pieces to skillet, spooning sauce over. Cover and simmer about 30 minutes or until chicken is tender. Remove bay leaf.