If you’re just learning to cook, write this recipe down. If you’re trying to impress a dinner party full of friends or a date, write this down. It’s brilliant.

Okay, it’s not brilliant, but it’s easy and seriously, everybody loves it. Chicken cacciatore is one of the first fancypants recipes I ever made and one of the things that convinced me that I might actually be good at this cooking thing.

So remember the baby bottles of wine I told you about? The ones that cost about $1 apiece at my local grocery store? Well, they’re back, this time with a yummy cabernet sauvignon.

You can use any red wine, and if you’re really into wine (I’m not), go ahead and buy a fancier bottle. But this will do the trick nicely, I promise you.

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 14oz of stewed or diced tomatoes. (I prefer no-salt added so I can have more control over the seasoning)
• 1 jar of spaghetti sauce (Classico Florentine’s my favorite)
  
• 4lb chicken parts. (Bone-in breasts are great, but if you’re looking for cheap this works great with drumsticks or thighs)
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 bell pepper, diced (use whatever veggies you like. Carrots are great in this dish too)
• 4 large cloves of garlic, crushed
• Generous amounts of Italian Herbs, salt and pepper to taste. (I will never tell you how much to spice something. Just remember that the flavor will intensify as the sauce reduces, so beware of over-salting)
• 1 mini bottle of cabernet sauvignon
• 1 tube of prepared polenta. My favorite is San Gennaro, and many grocery stores carry this. Scared of polenta? Serve this over noodles…chicken.
  

Season your chicken breasts with salt and pepper. Drizzle about 2 tbsp of Extra Virgin Olive Oil in the bottom of a high-walled sauté pan and turn the heat on medium. Give the oil a minute or two to heat up, then add the raw onion, garlic and vegetables. Sauté until the onions are translucent and the vegetables begin to soften. Place the chicken parts skin-down in the pan amongst the veggies and cook until the skin is browned. If you’re using drumsticks, brown them all around.

Pour the little bottle of wine over the chicken and sauté for 2 minutes before adding the tomatoes and spaghetti sauce. Sprinkle generously with Italian herbs…

QUICK TIP: Basil’s hard to screw up. Oregano’s easy to screw up. When in doubt, be generous with basil and take it slow with the oregano. Too much oregano will make your sauce bitter. If that happens, try adding some tomato paste to your sauce. The sweetness of the tomato will help balance it out. Also, salt’s about the easiest thing to screw up, and most shortcut dishes (because they start with canned veg or sauce) don’t require any extra salt. [Follow the cut for the rest of the recipe]

Anyway, back to the recipe. Turn the heat to low and cover your pan, leaving the lid a bit off-kilter to allow for some steam to escape. After 15 minutes, check, stir everything and flip your chicken. Repeat this once. When you repeat this a third time, remove the lid entirely. Your chicken should be cooked enough by now to start tasting your sauce. Season as needed. After another 15 minutes, the sauce should be plenty thick, super flavorful and the chicken will be cooked through.

If it’s not? Remove the chicken and turn the heat on high, stirring often, which will encourage the sauce to reduce.

So about the polenta… Slice your polenta into 1/4″ thick slices. If you’ve got a grill pan, oil it and heat it up. If not, just use a regular frying pan with a little bit of olive oil. Grill or sauté until browned, then flip it over. A few slices creates a great bed for this dish and it’s so much more fun than regular pasta!

Recently I made a super cool discovery that’s made cooking with wine so much easier. It’s brilliant, really.

The common advice you’ll get about cooking with wine is “don’t cook with it if you wouldn’t drink it”, which is fine I suppose, but honestly? I can’t justify using an expensive wine in my dishes when the cheap stuff works brilliantly. If I’m making a meal for guests, sure, I’ll pop for a more pricey wine, but when I just want something for my husband and I to enjoy, the cheap stuff is just fine. However, I’ll give you this caveat: We’re not wine snobs AT ALL. We like Wild Vines as much as we like a good Moscato d’Asti. Take that as you will.

So anyway, our local grocery stores has these little baby bottles of Turning Leaf wines — about 2 glasses worth — for $1 apiece. I stocked up on a few white and a few reds and let me tell you, they are PERFECT for cooking!! Just enough for a recipe!

I’ve actually tried to make this before in the past, but I ended up reducing the sauce too much and ruining it all. The turkey had amazing flavor, infused with the wine, but I ended up destroying the sauce. Naturally, when I saw the turkey thighs in the discount meat bin again (<$2 for two!) I picked them up for round two.

This is no shortcut recipe, but it is really simple. It just involves occasionally babysitting while you go about your day. Also? I just made this recipe up. I call it Country French Turkey because the flavor reminds me of Chicken Tonight’s Country French sauce, but I don’t know how French it is. I just know it’s delicious.

INGREDIENTS:

• Two turkey thighs, skin-on
• 3 carrots, diced
• 1 small onion, diced
• 5 mushrooms, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
  
• Thyme and Tarragon
• Salt & pepper
  
• 2 cups chicken/duck/poultry stock or broth (I used some of that duck stock I made a few weeks ago and froze)
  
• 1 baby bottle of Turning Leaf Pinot Noir
• Olive oil

Season the turkey breasts with a little salt and pepper. Coat the bottom of a sauté pan with a thin film of olive oil and, when hot, place the turkey thighs skin side down. Add the onions and vegetables and cook until the turkey skin is browned. Add the stock and wine, a dash of tarragon and a dash of thyme (fresh is better, dried is fine). The liquid should cover the meat about 1/2 way. Bring to a slow boil, then simmer, covered, on low for about 2 hours, checking the liquid levels every 30 minutes or so (my downfall the first time I did this) and flipping the thighs over about halfway through.

Leave uncovered for the last half hour to help the sauce reduction along. Keep an eye on it at this point! When all is cooked, you can continue reducing the sauce or you can thicken it with a little cornstarch. I serve this with a white-and-wild rice mix, but it would also be awesome with garlic mashed potatoes. It’s beautiful comfort food and a super elegant meal that certainly doesn’t taste like it costs so little per serving!

Tonight’s weekly Farscape night went the direction of many Farscape nights lately, filled mostly with eating and visiting until it was too late to get a proper episode in. But at least dinner was good! I love hosting dinner for friends, so when it’s our turn to host for Farscape it’s always a treat figuring out what to make. Since I had the leftover Zantho Zweigelt 2002 wine, and we picked up some great chicken breasts on super sale, I decided to make Chicken Cacciatore.

This recipe is deceptively easy, and the key is in the simmering time.  It made plenty for our group of five (including one who had seconds) and yielded four meals of leftovers! I bet the leftover sauce would freeze very well, too. Like many of my recipes, it’s sort of slapped together, but here’s what I do, in a nutshell:

INGREDIENTS (makes 6–9 servings):

• Chicken Breasts (about 3lb), cut into chunks
• 1/4 cup of flour, with some Italian herbs and pepper mixed in
• 1 very large or two small onions, chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, chopped
• 1 cup chopped baby carrots
• 6 sundried tomato halves, chopped
• 1 tbsp sundried tomato paste (regular would work too)
• 1 can/jar spaghetti sauce (I used Hunts Garlic & Herb, but remember not to add ANY salt if you use a canned sauce)
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 3/4 cup dry red wine
• Italian Herbs to taste
• 1-2 bay leaves

Heat about 3 tbsp of olive oil in a large sauté pan. Dredge chicken breast chunks in flour/herb mixture and place in the pan to brown on all sides (about 10 minutes). Add onions, pepper, sundried tomatoes and carrots and cook until the onion is translucent.

Next add the sauce, tomatoes, wine, herbs and bay leaves. Let this simmer, loosely coverd and stirring occasionally, for about 45 minutes. Serve over spaghetti or, as I did, angel hair pasta.

The rubber stoppers seal the wine, and the vacuum pump easily pumps out excess air. It’s always fun to punk out the air and then tap the little valve just to hear the “Pssssssst” of the seal releasing (even though it means we have to just seal it up again).

The vacuum sealer allows me to use a bottle of wine over a course of a couple meals without destroying its integrity, and best of all it encourages me to buy and try more wine because I know the leftover won’t go to waste. I think ours is a slightly different (more deluxe) model than the one at Target, but it’s a great buy for everyone who likes wine and hates to see it go to waste.

CONFESSION: I know nothing about wine. Not even a little. I just know that red wine is good for cooking with red meat, while white wine is better for cooking with lighter meats and seafood. The good thing about this is, I’m totally not a snob. This allows me to try all sorts of new things. And most of those things live in the discount wine bin of our local Binny’s Beverage Depot.

Cheap wine for cooking doesn’t always have to be crappy wine. Last time we stocked up I picked up some Zantho Zweigelt 2002, which I know now is a nice red Australian wine, and it was quite delicious. Added to this sauce, it was simply to die for.

So what’s in this mysterious but delicious sauce? Well, back in July I made some Alfredo Sauce from scratch and had plenty of leftover sauce. It’s Mustgo week here, and that was pulled from the freezer to be used this week.

I took some thin-cut ribeye and cut it up. I sautéed it with olive oil, one onion and a huge bag of brown mushrooms I bought at the Farmer’s Market last weekend. To this I added about half a cup of the red wine. When the meat was cooked, I removed it from the mixture to keep it from getting tough. I then let the rest of the wine cook down to a glaze.

I reconstituted my alfredo sauce with a bit of milk and soon it melted beautifully in a small saucepan. When this was good as new, I dumped it in with the wine and mushroom sauce, then tossed it all with the steak. I served it over Barilla Whole Grain Spaghetti and it was unbelievably good.

Not bad for a bunch of leftovers and a glass of $2 wine. Oh, did I forget to mention that? The wine, that usually goes for $12 a bottle, was $2 in the discount wine bin. Lucky me!

The recipe is pretty much my own, pieced together from a number of sources.

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 small onion, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• olive oil

Sauté the onion and garlic in a hearty splash of olive oil until onion gets clear. Add to this:

• 1 package baby bella mushrooms, quartered

Keep sautéing until the mushrooms look cooked through. Add to this:

• 6 vine-ripened tomatoes, chopped

I used 4 yellow tomatoes and 2 orange tomatoes because that’s what I happened to have available. Roma tomatoes would work great too, I’m sure.

• 8 oz of beef stock; I swear by Kitchen Basics brand stocks in cartons. They’re much less salty and more flavorful than Swanson or canned broths.

• 1/2 cup red wine; Today I used a bottle of Beringer Founder’s Estate Old Vines Zinfandel, 2005 that someone generously brought us at a dinner party and we weren’t able to use at the time. This might be my new red cooking wine; it was great to drink AND for flavoring the sauce.

• Salt, pepper and Italian herbs to taste.

Simmer this for about half an hour, until the liquid is cooked down. Serve over pasta (as I did), polenta (as I planned) with some yummy steaks. This sauce is so hearty, it would be fine on its own, too.