Rosie Makes Chicken Sandwiches.

 

 

 Let's make some chicken sandwiches.

 

Ingredients: 

 Dinner rolls or you can use a nice loaf of bread  (Please do not use Wonderbread or anything like it.)

 Chicken tender strips

kosher salt

Lawry's seasoned pepper or freshly ground pepper

thyme

 oil

unsalted butter pats

pesto

roasted red peppers

a nice melting cheese - Mozzarella, Swiss, or in my case, a nice Gruyère

 

 

 

Just in case you want to know what part of the bird you're eating, chicken tender strips are like tenderloins.  They're the pectoralis minor muscles located under the chicken breast near the rib cage area.  Smaller and thinner than chicken breast,they're usually described as chicken strips and they tend to be more tender and moist if cooked properly, which of course, I did. Season the chicken tenders with a little kosher salt, pepper, and a few shakes of thyme.

 Pour a film of oil in a small skillet over medium heat.  Add in a pat of butter, let it spit, sizzle, and melt.

You want the temperature around 350°.

Lay in the chicken and cook about 3 minutes on first side, turn over, and cook about 2 minutes second side.  Remove chicken from pan and let rest and cool a bit.

 

Spread a little butter on split dinner rolls and lightly toast. 

I always have homemade pesto in the freezer from last fall's Hurricane Harvest, so I thawed out one of my little baggies of pesto.

 

I also had a jar of roasted red peppers in the fridge which I'd opened up to use for pimiento cheese spread (The big jars of roasted peppers are cheaper than those little jars of pimiento peppers.) and I've found out that those large jars do not last long in the fridge once they've been opened.  The peppers needed to be used, so this is another way, besides making pimiento cheese, to use up the peppers.

 

Spread a layer of pesto on the toasted dinner rolls. 

Slice the chicken tenders lengthwise into 3 or 4 strips and lay on top of the pesto. 

Top with roasted red pepper strips, then slices of your cheese.

Run under the broiler until cheese is melted.

And serve. 

I've made this sandwich several times and each time I find something else to add to it.  You might consider some stemmed spinach leaves, bacon, sliced red onion, sliced pickled peperoncini, and/or sliced avocado doused with lime juice. 

 

 

 Now for the step-by-steps:

I started out with a hot pan, poured an thin film of oil in it, then added a plop of unsalted butter and let it spit, sizzle, and melt.  Temp around 375°.  Season your chicken tenders and lay them in the pan.

Let it brown on the first side maybe 3 minutes.

 

Turn, and brown the flip side (1-2 minutes).

Remove from pan.

 

 

 

 

Let the meat sit for a while so the juices can get reabsorbed.  If you cut right out of the cooking pan, you'll lose that juicy goodness.

  

When cooled down a bit, slice into thin pieces.

 

Thusly.

For the bread, I used those little dinner rolls since I had them on hand,

but you could go with a nice slice of whole wheat, pumpernickle, or even rye if you're so inclined.

Just butter and lightly toast the bread.

 

 

After toasting, I slathered on some pesto I had thawed out.  Every year, my basil in the garden comes up all over the place.   I love my volunteers.  I pick and top throughout the growing season, well into the fall.  And that's when I usually make a big batch of pesto.  I wait for a hurricane to come and hustle out the day before, strip my basil plants of all its leaves because they're gonna be gone anyway, and make a huge batch of pesto.  For instructions for my Hurricane Harvest Pesto, please CLICK HERE.  Just pare down for non-institutional amounts of pesto.  And FYI, I prefer pecans to pine nuts any day.  Also, the type of olive oil you use will greatly affect the taste.  For pesto, I want the basil flavor to shine, so I use a neutral flavored olive oil - Bertolli Extra Light.  And good grief!  Have you checked the price of that stuff lately?

Also, be sure to use a good quality Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. I mean the real thing.  Not Parmesan cheese from Wisconsin which is counterfeit. But Parmigiano Reggiano, which under Italian law, can only be produced in certain Italian provinces and is governed by laws meant to preserve the integrity, flavor, and quality of the product.  For the real deal, look for DOP on the label, meaning Protected Designation of Origin, or in Italian, Denominazione di Origine Protetta.  This is an exclusive certification assigned by the European Union that guarantees that the cheese was made in specific region of Italy according to traditional standards.  It indicates that the product owes its characteristics to its place of origin and that its production and processing occurs within that designated geographical area.  In other words, when making pesto, do not use Kraft Krap In a Kan.  Really, one shouldn't have it in one's kitchen.

 

Start with the layers on lightly toasted bread.

Spread on the pesto, then add some chicken slices. 

Some roasted red peppers.

Top with cheese and run it all under the broiler.

Enjoy.

Flat Iron Steak And Potatoes

Excellent meal tonight. And of course I'll be sharing it all with you. First, the 'taters.

I thinly sliced two red potatoes since that's what I had. You can use whatever potato you may have. Just slice them as thinly as possible.

I poured olive oil on my baking sheet (You could use either Extra Virgin or Extra Light.) and slid my potato slices around, then brushed the tops with the excess oil.

Sage on one half of the taters. Rosemary on the other half. I flove having my herb garden.

Add some freshly ground salt and pepper and dot with butter for extra goodness and flavor. The potatoes went into a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes, then I upped the temp to 450 degrees, cooked for 10 more minutes, then turned the slices over and cooked for another 10 minutes,

until nice and crisp and brown. Blot with paper towels.

Here's the flat iron steak, which I've only recently started seeing in the meat section. It's one of the most flavorful cuts I've had. It comes from the cow's shoulder, which is surprising to me, since it's quite a tender cut. We just season it with freshly ground salt and pepper and my new favorite seasoning - Montreal Steak Seasoning. (Check out their web site on the above link. It has "FLAVOR You Can See!") Let the steak come to room temperature before grilling. I always let meat come to room temp before cooking. And I don't know why. I Googled it today (And WHY ON EARTH does the spell check highlight freakin' GOOGLE?????) Anyways, about googling room temp meats. The same site said NEVERNEVERNEVER let meat get to room temp. It will immediately become rancid and if you eat it you'll die a horrible death. And on the same page, I read, "Let the meat come to room temperature. It makes the meat more tender."

Here are the potatoes at the halfway mark. Turn over and keep baking until they're all nicely browned and crisp.

Mr. Hawthorne grilled the steak perfectly, maybe 8 minutes total. One end of the steak was a little thicker than the other end, so he put that on the hotter section of the grill.

We don't boil our corn anymore. We cut off the ends and leave the husks on and nuke them: 2 minutes for 1 ear, 3 minutes for 2 ears, 4 minutes for 3 ears.

Lovely rare flat iron steak.

Crunchy, crisp potato chips

with the occasional flavors of sage and rosemary.

Here's my dinner: rare, extremely tender and flavorful steak, herbed, crunchy potato chips, sweet, buttery corn. There was only one thing wrong with this meal. I wanted a steak sandwich for lunch today and there was no leftover meat. Nada. Nor potatoes. Sooooo, when Daughter Hawthorne called at 2:21 this afternoon on her way home from last night's outing to get ready to be at work by 4:00 to ask me if there was coffee ready and was there any food and she didn't have time to take Giada for a walk because she had been really tired and was sleeping all that time, YadaYadaYada, I went ahead and put on a pot of coffee and toasted my Arnold's 100% Whole Wheat Sandwhich Thins, fried up a couple of bacon slices, sliced a tomato, added some lettuce, some thinly sliced pieces of the one and only chicken breast leftover from the other night with my bastardized version of the Alinea marinade, and made a special sandwich for Daughter Hawthorne.

Here's Dearest Daughter's Sandwich (And, yes, Sandwich should be capitalized.) Look at the texture of the chicken. That's what the marinade did. It's a smooth, clean, cohesive texture. The marinade had permeated the meat and I could taste every flavor in there: the citrus the fresh, raw coriander seeds with their magnificent pop between your teeth and in-your-face burst of greenness and cilantro the soy the ginger ... I wish somebody would make me a sammich.