Try to Understand,... He's a Magic Man

This week, inspiration snuck in the back door to my subconscious and started kick boxing my piss poor attitude. Its winter, GET OVER IT! It said like a true New Yorker. So I did. I'm over it. I am embracing winter and vow not to complain again until the bitter end when you just have to honestly.

My focus is back to cooking. I began with a fantasy of eating a deep rich sauce...it was chicken cacciatore, Hunter's chicken. I could taste the sauce in my mind. I needed to make it reality. My intention was to work off a real recipe and try to follow it as much as I could. I'm doing okay with that, but I just can't seem to help myself. I gotta do what I feel inside. What works for me is to read through all the top recipes first and then do a mash-up version of all of them.

Some of the great recipes used bell peppers, some mushrooms. Why not have both? The more vegetables in a dish the better. The roasted vegetables burst with aromas. All the ingredients feel so rustic. I do feel like a hunter.





After roasting the bell peppers, roma tomatoes, red onions and bella mushrooms you sear the chicken and then make the sauce of red wine, chicken broth and canned whole tomatoes. The wine picks up the bits and pieces on the bottom of the pan, reduces down and becomes very full-bodied. Then the chicken and added garlic braises in that amazing broth for 45 minutes only to come out and join forces with those vegetables along with fresh basil, rosemary and capers. Holy Good Lord this is something out of Lydia's Italian kitchen! I couldn't figure my way out of a paper sack this week and yet I made this??? Unbelievable.





This dish is the perfect winter warmer. Braised meats are consoling and soothing. Winter is something to celebrate! Winter is male for sure. I'd say he's kinda magical. He says 'You don't have to love me yet, let's get high awhile'. Then you relax and start to get it. The holing up, the quiet on the streets, the time to just chill your ass out and just be for a couple of months without that big 'ole sun making you feel inadequate because you're not out in the park enjoying yourself or throwing some stupid ball around. The bitter cold sort of making your apartment feel like a birds nest. It's revitalizing and its like this dish and old man winter.







The part where I let my hick show is I didn't have any freshly made pasta so I had to serve it over elbow macaroni. You can take the girl out the trailer park....