The sauce is a basic thing for a lot of the recipes in the book, so I decided to try it. You saute garlic and onions, then add two cans of whole plum tomatoes (squished in your hands). Then you can add basil and parsley, as well as a bit of salt and pepper. You boil this for 30-60 minutes, and at this point it's smelling beautiful. I put it in a tupperware container to save for other stuff I'll make this weekend.
The chicken itself was a little less successful; you heat some of the basic red sauce, cook pasta of your choice, and do the chicken cutlets. The idea is to pound out the chicken breasts and do an egg wash / bread crumb coating, then saute them in olive oil. This is where I ran into some problems.
I still don't have a meat mallet, so I ended up using a hammer. It sort of did the job, but it was pretty messy, so I clearly need to go out and get a mallet. Also, the recipe was really unclear about how much chicken to make, and so I had a lot of bread crumbs and egg wash left over. Oh well.
But I cooked them in a pan with some tomato sauce and oil, then covered them with cheese and finished them in the oven.
At this point, they were looking pretty mouth-watering.
Another problem with the recipe was it didn't say how much pasta to make, or what kind to buy. (The title of the recipe said "cappellini," which is a type of angel hair pasta, but it wasn't listed in the ingredients. Whoops.) So I just bought a favorite pasta of mine and Dave's: rigatoni. A box was about right for the amount of sauce I had (even though two 28 oz. cans of tomatoes sounds like a lot).
I was really happy with how it turned out, but now I have a lot of pasta and not that much chicken. The chicken did turn out very smooth and easy to cut, and the sauce was really bright, even though it was from canned tomatoes and not fresh in the summer. I need to keep this pasta sauce on hand year-round!
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