At minus ninety-four outside and a wind that snickers at seven layers of coat and pant like a wily gondola bandit does her next victim, sometimes you have to find your fun inside the names and hopeful vigor of indoor recipes. Saltimbocca sounds foreign – let's try it.
I'm certain the Bolognese Italian villagers are not just now cooling their cheeks from frostbite but what other climates on earth call heatbite, whereby the sun warms them, sometimes in excess. Sounds like
a neat area. In essence, the chicken saltimbocca calls for sliced-in-half and flattened (pounded, or rolling pinned) chicken breasts, sprinkled with chopped sage (surprisingly another "World's Healthiest Foods," as brain/memory enhancer and anti-inflammatory).
The cooked chicken is then supposed to take a layer of prosciutto and fontina cheese, finished by a light Marsala sauce. As time ran short when making this, though, I began to see this recipe as a much thinner and finer version of the old classic chicken cordon bleu, so I simplified and probably kid-ified it along the way by pan frying my chicken breasts with a thin coating of parmesan herb seasoning, then dropping over that an already cooked pile of deli ham. To seal it, I placed a round slice of provolone and let that melt over the contours of the meats, leaving a see-through, very zingy coating of cheese over all. In our eating imaginations we took a very quick turn from the Italian to French villa (cordon bleu means 'blue ribbon' in French), but nobody seemed to mind the scene change.
No comments:
Post a Comment