For a year or so, my friend Linda has talked about her Bombay Chicken. About how good it is. About how great it is for guests. Just overall fabulous. So instead of waiting for me to get around to making it myself, she came up to visit us on Sunday and fixed it (remember, I’m still not cooking at all because of my fractured foot). We were delighted – not only to have her stop for a visit, but to fix this great dish. DH was thrilled that once again, he didn’t have to cook dinner! She made it with 6 chicken breasts, and we enjoyed 3 full meals out of it with another in the freezer because the chicken pieces were so big. This is worth making. It’s delicious and would make a great company meal. You can make it ahead, too, except for baking.

The rice is so tasty – I love all the additions – mandarin oranges, coconut, golden raisins, almonds. And the curry flavor is subtle – not overwhelming at all. And you could make it without the curry if you are averse to it. Linda says she got this recipe about 1974 from her Aunt Ida. What a winner. Thank you, Linda!
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I’d never even heard about paella until about 1967. Wow, that’s 40 years ago. At the time I was living in Denver, Colorado, and friends had returned from serving 3 years U.S. Navy duty in Rota, Spain. We got acquainted with them and began having dinner at one another’s homes on a regular basis. Joan was a good cook, and was happy to share her knowledge about Spanish food she’d learned about and prepared. They had lived “on the economy,” meaning they’d lived off the base, in a regular house, not on the U.S. Navy base, so had made friends with a few locals. One particular neighbor shared food with them and showed her how to make some of the Spanish dishes.

So one night Joan and Roger prepared their version of Spanish paella. They also served us her version of Sangria, which I’ll share another day. Joan explained that after trying many different kinds of paella in Spain, the only one they really liked was this one which combines chicken, Italian-style sausage and shellfish all together in the one dish. She explained that the flavoring of the sausage added a big boost to the flavor. She also said she varied the kind and amount of fish/shellfish included in it, but it always had to have the chicken drumsticks and sausage added as well.

Happily I began making it and have done so about 15 times over the years. It needs to be made for a crowd as it will feed about 12 people. And I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that this is an expensive dish to make – the more shellfish, the more those dollars add up. Eventually I acquired a paella pan, an inexpensive model from Williams-Sonoma (not available per their website). It was less than $15. And I’d be remiss again if I didn’t tell you that this dish does take a moderate amount of prep time. There’s a bunch of mincing, chopping and sauteing in several pans, to be done. So leave ample time to complete all those tasks.

Here’s a photo of the drumsticks with the onions, yellow bell pepper and garlic. I will admit that over these 40 years I’ve had some difficulty with the paella – sometimes the rice didn’t get cooked. Sometimes the chicken didn’t quite get done, and sometimes the shellfish was undercooked. Maybe if this was made out in the open, in the huge paella pans used by the original sheepherders, you’d know it’s done because it was stirred more often. Here in the U.S. anyway, the presentation is half the pleasure of serving it – with all of the shrimp tails standing up, the drumsticks arranged artfully in a spoke pattern and the rice buried underneath. I’ve used scallops and langostinos, squid, fresh clams and fresh mussels too. Just don’t use all of those as there’s no way you can get them all on top of the rice.

Here’s my advice when making paella:

• cook the rice until it’s just a hair’s breadth from being done (I do this in a separate pan now);
• brown and cook the drumsticks until they, too, are just barely done;
• if using frozen shellfish, defrost it fully first;
• if covering with foil, leave it tented with a space for steam, as that helps to cook all e fish nestled into the top layer; in other words, form it into a kind of dome;
• and lastly, cook the Italian sausage until it’s lost all of it’s pink color, and mince it up into small bite-sized pieces.

Here’s a photo of the rice – you must brown the rice before finally finishing the preparation of the paella. It has a really rich color and the steamy flavor from it is SO good. Until I visited Hungary some years ago I didn’t know there were so many types of paprika, so I now have the traditional, half sharp and smoked. I used some of the half sharp and the smoked paprika in the paella this time and liked it. I order most of my spices now from Penzey’s, and you do know, don’t you, that paprika must be kept refrigerated. Little critters love to get into that herb and it loses its flavor left at room temperature. The addition of saffron is essential – it’s so very Spanish, and leaves a nice underlying character to the rice.

Finally, you begin pulling it all together. You add the canned clams and sausage to the rice, then all that is poured into the bottom of the paella pan, then the drumsticks are placed in a spoke. Shellfish is strategically placed in and around the drumsticks, tails pointing up. If you add mussels or langostinos, those need to be nestled into the mixture as well. By this time the pan is FULL, let me tell you. Lastly, you throw in a bit of fresh tomato, cover with foil and put into the oven. If the fish is cold, just remember that it takes a bit of time for the entire mixture to heat up enough to cook the fish, so make sure it’s done before serving. It always seems to take longer than I think. Take a peek and be certain the shrimp is cooked through. Whisk off the foil and garnish with the reserved minced red bell pepper and peas and serve.
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The Los Angeles Times’ Food Section happens to be one of the better ones in the country. Maybe I should qualify that. It used to be one of the best. So few major newspapers are devoting money and staff to the sections anymore, but you can access the food sections of many newspapers on the net now (click on this link for a list of newspaper food sections available online). But this recipe was in the “good old days,” when the food section was quite large. The recipe comes from a restaurant in Los Angeles called Cha Cha Cha and was printed about 7-8 years ago. I’ve never been to the restaurant, but I guess they do a lot of highly seasoned Caribbean foods, this being one of them. Jerk seasoning was new to U. S. cooking circles back then, and having never had it, I was intrigued to try it. It’s been a summertime regular ever since. And I want you to read the nutritional analysis this time (a very good-for-you dish).

You need to have a sizable repertoire of herbs and spices in order to concoct the herb/spice mixture. I make it up in quantity. I think I’ve read that once you combine herbs or spices their lifetime diminishes considerably. My stash of this mixture is from last summer, so I hope it lasts a few more months.

The chicken breasts are marinated in a combination of the herb/spice mixture, canned pineapple juice, orange juice and Worcestershire sauce. Ideally for 24 hours, but I’ve done it in far less when I haven’t planned ahead to make this. It’s very simple once you have the dry mix ready; I always marinate meat/chicken/fish in a plastic bag – one of the freezer types so there’s no chance of puncturing it. Or at least very little chance of a chicken bone or something poking a hole in the bag. When I am unsure about how safe the bag is, I’ll put it into the bag, then in a large plastic bowl. Just in case.

The only other info about this chicken that is different is how it’s cooked. It is done on direct heat, but after grilling for a fairly short time on the grill, you remove the breasts and slice them into strips, dip in the marinade again, then finish cooking. The batch pictured above didn’t get that last step because the head griller had already turned the meat over and it was deemed “too late” to do the slice. So we just slathered more of the marinade on it and allowed it to cook that way. It’s very moist as long as you don’t overcook it. Remove the chicken when it reaches about 150-155 degrees, allow to sit a few minutes then slice and serve. Discard the marinade as it’s contaminated.

You could boil the marinade down if you wanted to and make it a sauce, but it might take longer than you have to devote to it since the chicken cooks in nothing flat. I’m going to try that sometime. The chicken is extremely low in fat because the marinade has no oil in it at all. None. So it’s just the fruit juices that help it retain moisture. Our family from Placerville was here, and they deemed it good. My daughter Dana has made this a few times and recommends buying the pineapple orange combination juice (Dole makes it) instead of using separate canned juices. Makes good sense to me. I may stock up on that, because I never have pineapple juice on hand.

The original recipe called for double the ingredients for the marinade, but I’ve been perfectly happy with a smaller quantity and if it’s marinated in a plastic bag, you can turn it over and back, and all the chicken is in contact with the liquid.
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I don’t suppose this looks all that appetizing, does it? I forgot the lemon zest and chives garnish, which really helps, but I’ll tell you, the recipe is very good. I attended a cooking class some years ago taught by Nicole Aloni. She’s a well-known caterer and cookbook author among the Hollywood set. She worked for many years as the catering director at the L.A. Music Center, then opened her own business. Her reason for writing cookbooks was a statistic: that 98% of people love the idea of giving a dinner party, but only 2 % of people enjoy doing it. So, she decided to write books about how to entertain.

Her first book, Secrets from a Caterer’s Kitchen ($12.89 on Amazon), is mostly about how to plan a dinner party. The logistics, the recipe decisions, the serving aspects, decorating ideas, and most importantly how to plan ahead so you aren’t cooking in the kitchen the entire day of the party. And there are lots of recipes in there too. Subsequently she published another cookbook, called Cooking for Company (also $12.89). It’s more along the food-only line, with over 200 pages of recipes for entertaining. All with the idea that you want to do as much advanced prep as possible.

So now, back to the cooking class. She prepared a meal that night that was relatively easy, but high on flavor, and definitely with the do-ahead factor. I like to entertain. Surely I’m not in the 2% of that statistic. And generally I enjoy the cooking too, although as I’ve gotten older I find that standing and prepping food for 7-8 hours the day of a party is getting harder. My feet hurt. My back hurts, etc. So I do try to make some things ahead. And I also try to buy store-bought something – usually the appetizer – rather than make it myself. So, this recipe is a good one for that.

This dish is an easy one to make, and I’d say this dish has Greek origins. The recipe didn’t say. You’ll notice a long list of ingredients. Don’t be put off by it – nothing in the list is a problem – except the preserved lemon. Most people don’t have that on the pantry or refrigerator shelf. I bought mine at Sur la Table, although other better grocery stores should carry it too. Or if you have a Middle Eastern market near you, they’ll surely have it at half the price. Preserved lemons are ones that have been packed in salt and left to sit for a couple of months.

Most Middle Eastern cooks make their own. I tried it once, but because I’d never had them before, I wasn’t sure if mine turned out correctly and have never bothered to make them since. If you’re interested, and you have a bountiful lemon tree, you might want to make them – they’re certainly easy to do – click here for a recipe. You never use much of the finished preserved lemon – they’re quite pungent and very tart. And salty. So it’s almost like a garnish, although this is put into the sauce itself. You wouldn’t want to use it as a garnish – for all those same reasons – too pungent, tart and salty.

You make a savory sauce – broth, balsamic vinegar, shallots, Dijon, tarragon, preserved lemon and kalamata olives. It has bitter overtones with the Dijon, balsamic, kalamata olives and the preserved lemon. That’s the part that can be done ahead. Be sure you use low sodium broths, though, because you reduce the broth to half and it will be very salty – way too salty – if you use regular sodium broths. Then you grill the chicken breasts that have been marinated in balsamic vinegar for a couple of hours, and once finished, you slice the chicken into strips. And serve it with some kind of carb – like linguine or rice – because you want something to soak up the sauce as well as what you spoon over the chicken. The recipe is also very low calorie and low fat, but as Nicole said that night – “it’s so good – you don’t need to tell anybody that.”
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I really like to have a bunch of different ways to prepare boneless chicken breasts. But I think it’s easy to ruin them because they often get overcooked and are dry and somewhat tasteless. We buy them because if we are meat-eaters, we like to eat healthier sometimes. Having made and discarded at least a hundred recipes for chicken breasts, I was skeptical when Phillis Carey began talking about her method for chicken breasts. After the first sample some years ago of one of her recipes, I knew that SHE knew what she was talking about, and SHE knew how to prepare them.

Since I’ve attended Phillis’ classes for about 5 or more years, I soon learned she was writing a cookbook about chicken, Fast and Fabulous Chicken Breasts, published by The Casual Gourmet. Click here to go to a website where you can buy her books; it’s a store where she teaches in Encinatas. Once available, I bought one and continue to use the book regularly. Obviously, I recommend it. Phillis is a kind of casual, no-nonsense type of chef – not in her manner (she’s very cute and funny), but in her recipe design and preparation. She uses some canned things to save time (rather than making beans from scratch, for instance), but she knows how to punch a recipe with lots of flavor. That’s what I like, and it’s so important with chicken breasts, which don’t really have a ton of flavor to begin with. So it’s the sauce or what goes on it or with it that provides it. Click this to go to Phillis’ website to learn about the other places she teaches, etc.

So, on to chicken breasts. Until I met Phillis I certainly didn’t understand the cooking chemistry of chicken breasts. With or without a bone, the normal shape of a boneless chicken breast means that some of it cooks quicker (obviously the narrower, tapered end) and the thicker, meatier portion takes longer. Duh. We all know that, right? So, what do we do about it?

Preparing boneless chicken breasts (Phillis’ method):
(1) Remove the chicken tender and reserve it for something else (or I usually cook it with the dish, but a lot less time and remove it early).
(2) Remove any obvious fat and specks of bone if there are any.
(3) Have ready two pieces of plastic wrap – put one down on a flat surface and place a chicken breast on it, shiny side up, i.e. not the side where the chicken tender was. Place the 2nd piece of plastic wrap on top, then using a pounder (not the spiky side, but a flat side, or one of these pounder things pictured here) gently but firmly pound the meaty end only of the chicken breast. It will take about 10-12 whacks, and not heavy handed ones, to flatten the breast to an even thickness. You don’t want to make it as thin as the tapered end as that would be too thin, but pound to about 1/2 inch or a little less. The chicken breast kind of squishes around inside the plastic wrap, but hold the tapered end to help keep it in place.
(4) When cooking, if possible roll the short, tapered end under, which will help keep it from drying out (an optional step).

What I also learned was that prepared this way, it takes but minutes to cook a chicken breast whether pan frying it or baking it and it will be fully cooked, tender and juicy. Maybe I remember all those stories about salmonella and thought all chicken needed to be cooked much longer. Not so. And I’ve had much better success with chicken ever since. Thanks to you, Phillis.

Now on to the recipe itself. I’ve prepared this several times. It would make a very nice dinner for guests, but it’s also simple enough for a family meal too. If you want more of the sauce to spoon over linguine or rice or polenta, double the volume of the liquids, and add more garlic and prosciutto if desired. If I’m out of prosciutto (I try to keep a package on hand of the vacuum sealed type), I use thick-sliced smoked bacon, which is just fine. The breasts are lightly breaded and seasoned, then pan-sautéed to develop a lovely golden brown.

The only other caveat is: don’t use a non-stick pan, as you can’t develop the browning (I think it’s called the fond) necessary to flavor the dish. If you haven’t got one, well, maybe you should acquire one, but in a pinch, use the non-stick, but I think you’ll be disappointed.
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