Chicken Cacciatora-New Version
I will join in the chorus exclaiming that I am glad to be in this chapter!! When I told Michael what recipe that I had for this week, he was thrilled. It would be another recipe from his childhood that we would be able to try.
This recipe uses a whole cut up chicken, skin on, that is browned in olive oil with sliced onion and garlic. In this recipe the chicken is not floured before browning. Once the chicken is golden brown on one side, they are turned, white wine added and then cooked down. The tomatoes are then added and the dish is cooked until the chicken is practically falling off the bone. I actually simmered this for over an hour during which I turned the pieces a few times to keep everything moist.
This dish was wonderful. Michael took one bite and smiled and said, ‘Now, that’s a Cacciatora!”. We will definitely be making this one again. However, I think I would make a couple of changes to make this a bit more heart friendly. I would use chicken breasts and take the skin off of it before browning. That way this would be a dish we could indulge in more often!
ah the dilemma. if you listened to modern western nutritionalists we would all be eating chicken breasts with the skin off and steamed vegetables every night. I wonder what would happen if a team of them stormed a traditional part of italy and started barking orders. I suspect that within 2 generations the Italians would have the same health and weight problems as Americans, English and Australians. Same as if they went to Japan.
I was elated when I started reading your post, and let down at the end. It’s the the thighs and wings and skin and all the dark pieces that have flavor in a chicken. I love chicken, yet I seldom order in restaurants because often all they cook is the breast. I am not persuaded that unless your heart condition is critical, eating chicken breasts is going to make you live longer. It only seems that way because you are eating food with less taste. There are many things we can do to take care of our hearts – I have one too, you know, and it’s been going non-stop since 1924 – but I don’t believe that depriving yourself of what tastes best in a chicken is the commonsensible way to go.
I do think the chicken looks wonderful though. 🙂 It is my favourite way to cook chicken.
I’m with you on that one Marcella – my doctor told me that there is little health benefit to eating the breasts over the dark meat – but the difference in flavour – WOW Dark meat all the way now.
This looks good beth – well done.
Beth responds-Actually, Jerry, it was not the dark meat that I was trying to avoid. It was the skin and excess fat that is so hard to get rid of without taking off the skin. My favorite piece of chicken is the thigh. I meant to include the breasts and the thighs when I was writing my post, but it was around 4 in the morning and I just forgot to put it in I had made the dish earlier in the week and then didn’t get the writing done until after I had spent part of parent’s weekend with my son at his college. I got back into town at 10:00 that night and crashed, with my computer on my lap, before I had finished my writing. I woke up around 3:30, panicked and posted. When I woke up that morning I knew I had screwed up, because I knew Marcella was going to be upset. Oh well, next time hopefully, my inner editor will not be asleep at the wheel!!!
Beth, I love the dark meat, too. It was a preference learned from my mother, who learned it from her mother. What I always thought was a mother’s sacrific — letting the rest of the family have the prefered white meat piecesby ‘settling’ for the dark meat — turned out to be a mother’s guilty secret way of having the best for herself. LOL. All women learn the secret when they become mothers and cook a complete chicken for the first time.
Looks delicious!