This is an awesome, flavorful, pretty quick-to-make dinner. It works really well with defrosted, chicken breasts.

I’ve started buying the big bag of frozen chicken breasts at Trader Joe’s lately because they seem so much cheaper than the package of fresh breasts. I don’t use them for all my chicken needs but they are great to use here. I just put a couple of breasts in the fridge to defrost the day before I made this dinner.

I made a full sauce version (what’s listed below) with only two breasts. We have some leftover sauce but I’m sure I will find a use for it! Right now I’m thinking it’ll be a lunch this week with some grilled tuna and fennel. Mmmmm! (Another great use of frozen fish there).

Chicken Provençal w/ Olives & Tomatoes
Adapted from The CIA — Culinary Institute of America
4 (6- to 8-ounce) skinless boneless chicken breasts, tenders reserved for another use
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp dried lavender
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup onion, diced (I used the rest of a red onion I had in the fridge)
1 red bell pepper, cored and diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 flat anchovy fillet, mashed to a paste or 1 tsp anchovy paste from a tube
1/2 cup dry white wine
3/4 cup chicken stock or reduced-sodium chicken broth
1 strip of orange zest
1 16 oz can diced tomatoes (or whole tomatoes, I actually used a small can, not the big double-wide can, of San Marzano whole tomatoes)
12 pitted olives, chopped roughly (I used a combination of 3 oil cured black, 5 kalamata and 4 green Castelvetrano olives — hooray for the olive bar!)
1 tbsp finely shredded basil

Mix flour and dried herbs together and put on a plate. Pat chicken dry and sprinkle with some salt and pepper, then dredge in flour, shaking off excess.

Heat oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over medium-high heat until it shimmers, then cook chicken, turning once, until golden and just cooked through, 8 to 10 minutes total. Transfer to a platter and keep warm, covered. Cooking time will depend on the thickness of your chicken. Check the temp with a meat thermometer to be sure (165 degrees F).

Add the onion, bell pepper and garlic to the skillet and cook over medium heat, stirring, until soft, about 5-6 minutes.

Add the anchovy paste and cook about 30 seconds. Add wine and bring to a boil, scraping up brown bits. Stir in tomatoes, stock, and olives and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until mixture has thickened a bit, 6 to 8 minutes.

Add the chicken and any accumulated juices back into the sauce pan and simmer until just heated through, about a minute or two. Serve sprinkled with basil and serve.

This goes great over some egg noodles. Garnish with feta if you have any because that’s really good!

We try to bring lunch during the week to save money and to eat healthier. I have also been trying to enforce a fish 2x a week for lunch rule. Eh, most times it’s more like once a week, but we’re trying! Sometimes this means tuna, not the ( good awesome kind) and sometimes that means other things.

This is my new favorite other thing and I think jwa like it a lot too. That is no small feat. He is very skeptical of fish (especially fish tagged with Cheap Fish Project, which this is — $5/lb, frozen, at Trader Joe’s).

I’ve also discovered a new, fun thing to do with orzo — toast it in the pan with olive oil before cooking it with the boiling water. It gives it a nutty taste that is quite delicious!

This is also easy to whip up the night before specifically to bring to work the next day.

Orange-Rosemary Grilled Mahi Mahi
Marinade:
1 tbsp orange zest
2 tsp chopped fresh rosemary
2 garlic cloves, minced
Juice of half an orange
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp white wine vinegar

Fish:
1 lb mahi mahi, cut into bite-sized cubes
salt & pepper
juice from the other half of the orange
a little more olive oil

Everything Else:
3/4 cup orzo
1/4 tsp chopped rosemary
1 tbsp olive oil

6 cherry tomatoes, halved
4-5 artichoke hearts, halved
6 green olives, halved

Whisk all the marinade ingredients (orange zest through vinegar) together in a bowl or a freezer bag. Add the fish and marinate in the fridge for about 1-2 hours.

Heat a grill pan (or a regular skillet) and just drizzle a little of olive oil in the pan. Hit the fish with a little salt and pepper and cook until just barely opaque — about 2-3 minutes per side. After you turn the fish over the first time, add the artichoke hearts and the cherry tomatoes to the pan while you cook the other side of the fish. When it’s done, remove everything from the pan and set it aside in a bowl. I squeeze the other half of the orange on the fish, artichoke hearts and tomatoes and cover it up with aluminum foil.

Heat the other tablespoon of oil in a small pot and add the orzo and rosemary. Toast for a minute or two, then add some water and bring to a boil. Add some salt. Cook until done, about 8-10 minutes. Drain.

Assemblage
Divide the orzo among your plates (or containers). Then add the tomato/fish/artichoke heart/OJ mixture and the olive halves. Top with a few crumbles of feta, if you are feeling fancy and perhaps a drizzle of olive oil.

If you’re bringing this for lunch the next day, it keeps and travels very well and people will see your lunch and get all jealous. Ha!

Just give it about 1.5 minutes in the microwave (on full power) to reheat.

Wow! Two posts in two days! Amazing! Uh, anyway, lately, I have mentioned to jwa (threatened?) that we will be eating more fish — at least two times a week. The problem is, we have expensive, fancy-pants fish tastes. Mostly, we both like salmon, tuna and halibut and that’s pretty much our fish repertoire. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love salmon, tuna and halibut but, those fishes are kinda up there in price.

So, I am starting a new project to try different, more, shall we say, economical kinds of fish. First up? Some frozen “Wild Holland Sole Fillets” that I got at Trader Joe’s. Price: $6.99/pound. Not bad.

After some searching, I came across a recipe that was featured on Cooking Live with Sara Moulton a few years back, that incorporates butter, olives, capers and bacon. See — we are eating more fish because it is healthy. We are eating the butter and bacon to eat more fish. Excellent!

Lemony Sole with Green Olives, Bacon, and Capers
4 (6-ounce) sole fillets
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp unsalted butter
1/4 cup chopped green olives
3 tbsp drained capers
3 cloves garlic, chopped or minced
3 strips cooked bacon, crumbled
1 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley
Beurre Blanc (see below)

Beurre Blanc
1/4 cup white wine
1 shallot, finely chopped (I used extra — mm!! shallots)
4 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into cubes and chilled
1 tspn fresh lemon juice
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
Optional: 1 tbsp cream
Optional: 4 more tbsp butter

Combine the wine and shallot in a medium saucepan, bring to a boil, and cook until reduced by half. Now, if you are really crafty, before you even add the wine, you will use the pan you used to fry the bacon in. And you will sweat the onion for a few minutes first in residual, after-being-wiped-out, bacon grease. Next after reducing the wine-shallot mixture, add the cream (if using, I did not) and continue reducing until just thickened. Reduce the heat to low.

While whisking constantly, add the butter, little by little, waiting for each addition to be incorporated before adding more, to make a smooth sauce. Here, the original recipe called for 8 tablespoons butter — I reduced that by half. Whisk in the lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Set aside in a warm area. (The sauce may break if it’s too hot or too cold.)

Dredge the fillets in the flour and season with salt and pepper. Preheat a large skillet over medium heat. Add the 2 tablespoons oil and 1 tablespoon butter and heat until hot.

Add the fillets and cook, turning once, until just cooked through, about 4 minutes. Remove to a plate and keep warm with foil.

Remove the skillet from the heat, add the olives, capers, and bacon, and stir, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom, until the mixture has warmed through. If you have a lot of brown bits to scrape up, I found that adding about a 1/4 cup of white wine worked well.

Add the beurre blanc and parsley and stir to combine. Spoon the sauce over the fillets and serve immediately with rice or orzo.

The verdict: Come on, it had butter and bacon. Of course it was really good! I tried to healthy it up just a little by using olive oil instead of vegetable oil, decreasing the pan-frying butter to just one tablespoon and reducing the sauce butter to 4 tablespoons. Eh, fine, it’s still not exactly a healthy meal but it was a wonderfully successful fish experiment. And the huge side of steamed broccoli counts towards the healthy. So there.

Next up in the new kinds of fish experiment? Mahi mahi — probably next week.

A week or so ago, jwa and I were outside surveying the garden and we noticed we had about 40 tomatoes (a mix of Early Girls and Romas) that had all ripened at once. Seriously. Something needed to be done and be done fast.

Enter Provencal Tomato Sauce. Wow — so tomatoey and garlicky. Make a batch or two and enjoy a little bit now and a little bit later from the freezer. I found this sauce to be so rich and intensely tomato flavored, I even added a little vegetable stock to thin it out just a bit.

We had some over some plain store bought gnocchi. Wonderful. The rest will be enjoyed over some linguine one night, once the weather is chilly again.

Provencal Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce
Recipe adapted from Gourmet magazine
olive oil for brushing pans
1 head garlic
4 pounds vine-ripened red tomatoes
1 tbsp fresh rosemary leaves
1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
3 tbsp fresh orange juice, or to taste (I used the juice from 1 medium orange)
Optional: 1/4 cup vegetable stock

The garden tomato bounty

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. and lightly brush 2 shallow baking pans with oil. Now, if this temperature is too high for your oven (read: if it’s not spotlessly clean, it’ll smoke), do it at 425 degrees and just increase the cook time about 5-10 minutes. How do I know this works? Let’s just say I will be cleaning the oven soon…

Separate garlic head into cloves, discarding loose papery outer skin but keeping skin intact on cloves, and wrap in foil, crimping seams to seal tightly. Cut tomatoes into 1/2-inch-thick slices and arrange in one layer in baking pans. Sprinkle 2 teaspoons each of rosemary and thyme evenly over tomatoes and season with salt and pepper.

Put foil-wrapped garlic in one of baking pans with tomatoes and roast garlic and tomatoes in upper and lower thirds of oven, switching position of pans halfway through roasting, about 35 minutes total, or until garlic is tender and tomatoes are slightly charred. There will be tomato shrinkage — that’s okay. Unwrap garlic and cool slightly.

Peel skins from each clove and force pulp with warm tomatoes and herbs through a food mill fitted with small disk into a bowl. Another option is to use a hand-held blender and puree it that way. The blender will leave little bits of tomato skin, skin but I didn’t mind that at all. It builds character.

Finely chop remaining teaspoon rosemary and remaining teaspoon thyme and stir into sauce with orange juice. If it’s a bit thick, this is where you an add a little vegetable stock. Season sauce with salt and pepper and reheat if necessary. Sauce keeps, covered and chilled, 4 days or, frozen, 4 months. To reheat, simmer sauce over low heat and reseason with orange juice, salt, and pepper.

Like I mentioned above, I served this sauce with gnocchi and sauteed zucchini. It made great lunches for both jwa and I to bring to work.

A fairly quick and healthy dinner. Minimal cheese. Spinach. Beans. Carrots. See? Pretty healthy. We had this meal two Sundays ago, after we got back from Port Townsend. I believe I used roasted garlic hummus but you could use any kind you like. You could also, of course, make your own hummus or hummus-like dip.

The Parmesan cheese on the outside of the breasts give it a really nice and tasty crust. The sprinkle of Parmesan on the inside is just for fun. Fun!

Hummus and Spinach Stuffed Chicken Breasts
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/4 cup hummus
8 or so spinach leaves
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
2 tbsp olive oil
salt
pepper
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup chicken broth
Optional: Your favorite spice blend — for instance, I used a little Sunny Paris (probably about 1 teaspoon total)

Spread a piece of plastic wrap out over a cutting board and lay a chicken breast down. Fold a layer of the plastic wrap over it and pound the breast out until it’s much thinner. Repeat with the other breast.

Sprinkle a little seasoning mix if using and lay down some spinach leaves on each flattened piece of chicken. Divide the hummus between the breasts. Sprinkle each with a little Parmesan.

Roll up. It might be a little messy but you should be able to get it into a rolled shape.

Sprinkle each chicken roll-up with some salt, pepper, a little more seasoning mix and some Parmesan cheese. Heat a skillet over medium-high heat and add the oil. Then, add the chicken, seasoned and parmed side down. Go ahead and season the side facing up and let it brown for a couple of minutes.

Flip it over and brown the second side. Add the orange juice and broth to the pan and reduce the heat to medium. Cover partially and let cook until the chicken is done (165 degrees — make sure you are checking the hummus temperature too).

Remove the chicken and cover with foil to rest. While it’s resting, turn the heat up on the pan and reduce the sauce by about half — 5-7 minutes. Serve the chicken with a little orange sauce drizzled over it.

Now the carrots came about like this: while in Port Townsend, jwa and I were walking around the Uptown area after the Farmer’s Market had ended. One of the vendors was having trouble getting the door up on the back of her truck. jwa and I helped her get it attached and she gave us a bunch of carrots. Awesome.

That night, when we got home I whipped up this side dish to go with the chicken.

Good Samaritan Carrots
1 bunch carrots, preferably procured through a good deed
5 cloves garlic
1 tbsp olive oil
salt & pepper

Clean the carrots and cut off the tops. I like to scrape off a bit of the peel but you don’t have to. Cut up into about half the size of baby carrot snacks. Peel the garlic and slice thinly. Heat a pan on medium heat and add the oil. Add the carrots and pan roast slowly, for about 5 - 7 minutes, until they start to get a little color. Add the garlic and continue to cook about 10 more minutes, stirring frequently. Don’t let the garlic burn but it should have a nice golden color.

When the carrots are tender and done, remove from the pan and serve with the chicken.