Pollo alla Pancetta, Erbette e Pinoli

Now that my classes are almost over for the term (Tuesday!) I’m going to buckle back down and get into Rosetta Stone’s Italian lessons. I’m slacking. We are off to Italy in five months. Five. Months. It still seems hard to believe, but it’ll be here so soon!

Andrew’s already much farther along with the language than me [never mind that he grew up with it as a kid], and the plan was to try and be fluent enough to speak in Italian to each other as much as possible in the house before we left. If there is one thing I wished most the last time I was in France, I wished I could speak French. So this seems like the logical step for me to take for Italy.

I stole this recipe from La Cucina Italiana, too. I had to modify it because the store seemed to be out of pancetta, so proscuitto it is. I also couldn’t find swiss chard, so I went with rainbow chard. I’m full of substitutions lately. The rest of the recipe I followed, and as usual it’s not a ton of ingredients. The higher quality the ingredients the better, y’know? It drives me nuts that the recipe called for “an orange,” and you use the juice of that orange to braise the meat. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen oranges that yield all different amounts of juice. This one was probably close to a half cup. I used it all. It makes for a very orange flavored sauce, especially coupled with the orange zest. I almost wished I would have halved the juice and added some white wine, too. I’m just glad it was a fresh orange. If you used bottled stuff, it would have totally been gross changed the taste.

I didn’t grab enough greens, either. I love greens, and there was only a small bit for each pair of thighs. When in doubt, get more greens. They did taste pretty incredible with the orange and pine nuts [the same pine nuts I kept eating straight out of the bag while I cooked]. Dare I say it was kind of refreshing to not have the heaviness of cheese in this dish? I hope the cheese gods don’t hear me…

Inspiration: La Cucina Italiana

Ingredients

• 8 chicken thighs
• 1/2 lb thinly sliced pancetta [or proscuitto]
• 1 orange
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 2 bunches swiss chard, roughly chopped
• salt
• fresh cracked pepper
• 2 tablespoons pine nuts

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 400° and spray a large baking dish with cooking spray [I used an 11×7″ dish].
2. Cover the thighs in fresh cracked pepper and then wrap them with the pancetta [proscuitto].
3. Place them evenly in the baking dish and bake them for 20 minutes.
4. Peel a 1″ slice of orange peel from the orange. Slice it into slivers. Set aside.
5. Cut the orange in half and squeeze out the juice into a bowl. Set aside.
6. Once the chicken as cooked, remove it from the oven and allow to cool.
7. In a large skillet, big enough to hold all the chicken, add the olive oil and garlic on medium heat.
8. Saute until the garlic starts to change color and add the chard and orange peel.
9. Stir frequently until it starts to wilt. Sprinkle with salt.
10. Arrange the chicken on top of the chard, pour in the orange juice, and top with the pine nuts.
11. Bring the orange juice to a boil before covering the pan with a lid [or tin foil], and simmering the chicken for 10 minutes.
12. Remove from heat and serve.