Date Cooked: February 6, 2009
Page: 337
Rating: A-
I blogged about the chicken cutlets which were the main component of this dish so today I will tell you about the dish as a whole. Besides the chicken I needed to make the sauce and cook the pasta. Let’s start with the sauce.
The book calls for a can of crushed tomatoes along with your traditional herbs and spices. I didn’t have crushed tomatoes so I used dice tomatoes… I really didn’t like the look of it so I had a bright idea! I grabbed the often forgotten immersion blender and reduced the sauce to a smoother consistency. I didn’t puree because I wanted some texture to the final product. I left the sauce to simmer while the chicken cutlets were being cooked.
Now for everything that I have learned apparently boiling pasta is not something I am learning very well. I boiled some spaghetti while the cutlets were finishing up and then drained it leaving it to sit for a minute or two while I got the plates ready. I forgot to rinse the cooked pasta. It took only a couple minutes for the entire batch of spaghetti to clump together into a stringy sticky mass. I literally had to cut the pasta with shears into serving size clumps because the starchy noodles had fused together.
On top of each clump of noodles I added a chicken cutlet and then some sauce. This is the part that got me confused, but not until later. I was browsing through some blogs and came across several chicken parmesan posts. In all of the pictures I noticed something different from mine. The cutlets had the cheese added on top of the sauce and then broiled. I felt like a fool until I re-read the recipe and it does actually say to add the sauce over the cheese. Interesting considering their picture of Chicken Parmesan on their website shows the melted cheese on top of the sauce. Regardless it all tasted great!
Rating: A-. The chicken parmesan was delicious even though the noodles had turned out clumpy. Once mixed with the sauce though, they were fine. The chicken as said in the previous post was delicious and the sauce was flavorful and mild enough not to drown out the chicken. I’m happy with the results.
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Actually, I've read that you're not usually supposed to rinse pasta, unless it's for a cold pasta salad. The starch helps the sauce cling to it a lot better than if you rinse it. What you just need to do is get the timing right so that the pasta isn't sitting around before the rest of the dish is finished.
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