I decided to move away from Jamie Oliver for once, and went back to ‘The Silver Spoon’, which is still one of my favourite recipe books. Inspired by ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ (long story) I settled on Involtini di Pollo alla Salvia, which is ‘Chicken Roulades with Sage’, but it sounds a lot more impressive in Italian.
It’s actually a pretty simple recipe. A quick web search actually found someone who is as much of a geek as me, and blogs their recipe attempts as well – so thanks to Sara for giving a good description of the process.
I decided that just having sage in the middle might be a bit ‘ordinary’, so I decided to ad some mozzarella as well. So here we go.
Pictures : click to show
Pretty simple stuff – some nice chicken, parma ham, sage and mozzarella for the involtini. Tomatoes and garlic for the sauce.
Put the chicken breast between some clingfilm, and basically bash it about with a rolling pin to make it nice and thin. I actually made the first one a bit too thin, so it started to fall apart a little bit, but the second was a lot better.
The chicken breast basically doubles in size. It’s quite delicate to handle, but not too bad if you’re careful.
Cut the chicken in half into a couple strips, and put sage on top.
This was the bit I added, by including mozzarella in the middle of the chicken.
Basically, I’ve just rolled up the chicken, then wrapped it in the parma ham, and put cocktail sticks through to keep it all in place.
I made the sauce simply by putting the tinned tomatoes in a pan with the garlic, some salt and pepper, sugar and white wine.
Put the involtini on to cook on a fairly medium heat. They’re quite hard to turn with the cocktail sticks in, but you can move the sticks from one side to the other to make it easier.
Halfway through the cooking.
The involtini Are now browned all over, so I put some white wine in to add moisture, and covered them on a low heat for 20 minutes while I cooked the pasta.
The involtini are completely cooked, and just resting.
Serve, just pasta with a tomato sauce, and some golden baby tomatoes and basil.
I really liked this, especially as it was so simple to make. Lisa thought the sage was quite strong, but I didn’t get that at all. You could clearly do all sorts of different things in the middle of the chicken – maybe something spicy with chilli or peppers. I’ll definitely try a variation on this again.
Tags: chicken • food • involtini • Silver Spoon
Categories: food diary
Your blog is gorgeous! Love the bridge photo and your food descriptions are mouthwatering…
Look forward to reading more, sara