Pignola Herb Chicken

My Thai peanut chicken recipe is so good, I've been thinking of other ways to get pulverized nut-meats onto the outside of grilled chicken. Pine nuts (pignolas) are an obvious choice. I decided one day to do a rosemary brine and basically a pine nut pesto coating for the grill. It came out super good. I have toyed now with excluding the rosemary brine and just doing a parsley/garlic/pignola pesto coating and that was almost equally as good. Next time I think I'll be trying a more intense rosemary application, like maybe blanching it and including it directly in the pesto. In any event, here's the basic formula:

Season chicken pieces in prep for grilling. This could mean an herb brine, or at minimum, salt and sit.

Put 1/2 to 1 cup pine nuts into the food processor, along with a handful of parsley or other herb and about four cloves garlic. Add salt and process, adding olive oill until the correct consistency is achieved. There should still be a few almost whole pignolas hucking around in there.

A half hour or fifteen minutes or so before grilling, toss chicken pieces with a liberal amount of pesto to coat. Let sit and then grill normally. Using a nutty oily coating makes it even more critical that one grills at the right temperature, that is, not too high. You want to avoid flare-ups and burning the nut coating. Not tasty. Do it right and you'll have speckles of black dominated mainly by golden brown nutty pasty goodness. Hit it with some lemon juice just before devouring for an extra-bright crazy experience.

Lasagna Notes

The first lasagna that I felt was wholly presentable. Nard status: rocked.

A couple days in advance, I made some vegi red sauce - using my normal method with zucchini, squash and eggplant. There was enough left over that I thought, "I can make a lasagna with this and the leftover eggplant when Mom visits." Good thinking.

I started by sautéing eggplant slices about a quarter inch thick in olive oil. Damn, those things suck it right up! I salted them in the process. If I salted beforehand, dried, and then sautéd, I'd probaby get better results with less oil absorbtion. Interestingly, about 3/4 through the frying process, they gave up a lot of the oil they had previously absorbed...

Next, I sautéd half a red onion in the same pan, continuing to build the fond. After they had browned nicely, I added about 3/4 cup of red wine to deglaze. To this I added about half of a small can of tomato paste to thicken. After the paste was well-integrated, and I judged that most of the alcohol had evaporated, I added the leftover suace, increasing its volume. One this all had heated through, I proceeded to build the lasagna.

A thin layer of sauce
A layer of...
no-boil noodles
dressed-up ricotta
eggplant
noodles
sauce
noodles
sauce
eggplant
noodles
sauce
ricotta dollops
(i think)

Baked for 30-40 minutes, covered. Then 10-20 minutes uncovered to brown top. Oven at 375ºF. Could have baked less covered and browned more.

Too thin. Could have gone up to double the layers if I had the raw materials.

Ideas to Attempt

• Indian fried chicken
• Matzoh balls using other unleavened cracker bread
• Melonade
• Kidney bean or sweet pea hummus
• to be continued...