Chicken Saltimbocca

As I mentioned earlier in the week, one of the things I love about visiting Ireland is the discovery of new shows. Between Ireland and the UK, they have some pretty good and some delightfully bad shows. One quality discovery I made while visiting was Catherine’s Italian Kitchen. 

Catherine’s Italian Kitchen features Catherine Fulvio, an Irish native with a Sicilian husband, and the show is filmed between Ireland and Sicily making for some gorgeous scenery as well as some great recipes. Catherine is a graduate of Darina Allen’s Ballymaloe Cookery School, a place I will take cooking classes at some point in my life.

After seeing the show on television while in Ireland, I was delighted to find an episode being shown on the entertainment system on our Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Boston.

In the episode I saw, Catherine made a pork saltimbocca, wrapping pork fillets with prosciutto and quickly pan frying them for a flavorful main course. 

Saltimbocca literally means “jumps in the mouth”, and the simple flavors in this dish definitely do excite the palate. I decided this weekend that I would make a quick variation on Catherine’s saltimbocca using chicken instead of pork. I started by dividing two chicken breasts in half and cleaning off the icky parts.

Then I placed the chicken between two cutting boards (only used for chicken, then rinsed and put in the dishwasher!) and pounded them down with my fists until they were very thin.

The thin fillets mean that the cooking time is minimal. Once the chicken was thin enough, I wrapped each piece with a layer of prosciutto so that the entire half of a chicken breast was in contact with it.

I heated a mix of butter and olive oil in a skillet then gently placed the chicken pieces in.

For most of the chicken pieces, a few minutes on either side was just enough to make sure they were done. This guy up front was a little thicker, so I ended up placing the pan into the oven for a few minutes to cook through, and we ate the done chicken first.

I served the chicken with a top secret recipe that I tested for a cookbook that is not yet released. A post on recipe testing will be up later today!

My chicken did not turn out as pretty as Catherine’s pork saltimbocca did, but it was certainly an enjoyable dinner and something I would make again in a heartbeat. Chicken can get kind of dull, and the prosciutto was just the thing to jazz it up!

What was the last cooking show inspired meal you made? Do you have any fun ways of making chicken to make this common protein a little more exciting?