Category: Chicken

Retro Food for Modern Times: The Busy Woman’s Curried Chicken Salad Revamp

Who doesn’t love a chicken salad?  Shut up vegans and vegetarians.  I heard you.  Ok…what normal person doesn’t love a chicken salad?

Busy women of the 1970’s loved a chicken salad.  They also loved curly parsley.  I have never seen so much curly parsley in my life as in these old cookbooks.  They also loved scales.  Scales feature heavily in vintage cookbooks.  I have no idea why.  Some sneaky physics lesson maybe.  Which weighs more – parsley or a lead weight?  Garlic or clams?  Maybe these pictures were the precursor to the BrainTraining games of today where you are shown a kitten and an elephant sitting on some scales and you have to say which one weighs the most (it’s usually the kitten).

The Busy Woman’s Curried Chicken Salad  is a  a pretty good  recipe, all it needs is a few little tweaks to adapt it to modern taste.  I suggest the following:

  • Toast your curry powder before adding to the dressing. It smooths the flavour out.
  • Use fresh mushrooms – I kept mine raw
  • Use fresh asparagus – I steamed mine.
  • I didn’t  put red pepper in my version  because I don’t like it.  I added some tomato for colour and celery for crunch.  Other things you could add into ths would be carrots, avocado, steamed green beans, nuts….pretty much whatever you have or you like!

Enjoy!

The Italian Cuisine I Love – Rolled Breast Of Chicken

You may recall this photo from the first post on the Italian cuisine I love.  It’s one o f the photos supplied by the Ruffino Wine Company and one of my favourites from the book.  I made the Rolled Breast of Chicken and it was delicious.  This is a great meal when served with the following recipe for Cavolo nero, and of course some Italian wine!

Rolled Breast of Chicken.

  • 2 tbsp onion, minced
  • 2 cloves garlic minced
  • 2 tbsp oil
  • 4 sweet italian sausages (I  used spicy…because some like it hot!)
  • 1/4 cup fresh white breadcrumbs
  • 1 tbsp parsley, chopped
  • 1 tsp tarragon
  • 2 large chicken breasts
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine
  • salt & pepper

Cut the chicken breast horizontally in half.

Heat the oil in a skillet, add garlic and onion and saute or 1 minute.  Strip sausage out of the casing, add to skillet and cook until well browned, breaking up any lumps with a fork.

Remove sausage, onion and garlic with a slotted spoon and discard all but one tablespoon of fat from the pan.

Mix sausage, onion and garlic with breadcrumbs, parsley, tarragon, salt and pepper and put a pat of this stuffing on  each of the chicken pieces.

Roll them up, tuck in the ends and secure with toothpicks or string.  Add butter to skillet, saute the chicken rolls until browned on all sides – two or three minutes.

Remove rolls from skillet to a hot serving platter  and remove thread or toothpicks.  Add wine to skillet, delglaze quickly and pour sauce over rolls.

My Version

Rolled Breast of Chicken